


The Obvious and Proper Sense

by breathedout



Series: Unreal Cities [2]
Category: Bloomsbury Group RPF, Historical RPF
Genre: Banter, Basically just a really self-indulgent trip down Lytton Strachey Lane, Cambridge, Edwardian Period, Frenemies, Hate Sex, Jealousy, Lovers to Friends, Lytton does Cambridge, M/M, Masturbation, Multiple Pairings, Multiple Partners, Not Romance, Oxford, Rivalry, imaginary sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-15
Updated: 2013-04-15
Packaged: 2017-12-08 13:25:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/761818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathedout/pseuds/breathedout
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cambridge, 1905. We’re still talking, you’ll be surprised to hear, about love and sodomy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Obvious and Proper Sense

**Author's Note:**

> Massive historical notes at the end of this massively silly story. While this is probably better-supported with factual evidence than, say, my undergraduate honors thesis, there are a few logistical things that I just let slide out of deference to the fact that it’s filthy porn (a decision I feel Lytton Strachey would back 100%). Expect wit and absurdity, not realism or romance.
> 
> Also: in 1905 the ages of the five main players here range from 19 (Hobhouse) to 25 (Strachey). There’s therefore no actual underage sex that takes place, even by modern standards. But there are _extensive_ references to underage sex that may or may not have happened in the past. Proceed accordingly.
> 
> My immense gratitude to the [Antidiogenes](http://antidiogenes.tumblr.com/) crowd for the continuous encouragement, to [Orla](http://reckonedrightly.tumblr.com) for the brit-pick, and to [greywash](http://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/profile) for not just a bang-up beta job but also for picking me up when I was down about this story, chivvying me when I was lazy, bribing me with alcohol and lesbian pornography, and being possibly the one other person in the world with the patience for rendering Lytton Strachey's sexual fantasies into stream-of-consciousness narration. I feel lucky to know her, every day.

 

##  **December 1904**

**Lytton Strachey to Leonard Woolf  
** **Trinity College, Cambridge**

**I can get advice from no one, but feel half sure that it would be best not to come up next term. Hobhouse I think could be easily elected [to the Apostles], and to do what I should like to do—to get him, if only in some small way for myself—would I’m afraid need a desperate struggle. […] Keynes is the best person to talk to, for he at least has brains, and I now believe is as kind as his curious construction allows him to be.**

 

* * *

 

‘Keynes!’ Strachey shouted. Keynes kept right on, down the walk; Strachey cursed, and followed.

‘I—good God, Keynes, I made your—apologies to—Hobby and it was damned awkward, the least you can do is—delay a bloody—Keynes!’ he called again, stopping dead. ‘Maynard!’  

Keynes drew up at last. Just under the archway that gave onto Trinity Lane he stood shaking, hands clenched at his sides. Strachey would have thought _shoulders heaving_ as well, if he himself hadn’t been coughing nearly hard enough to expel his own lungs through his throat. Keynes didn’t turn round.

‘Keynes,’ Strachey panted, drawing up behind the man. ‘Keynes, what on earth were you thinking? Running out on us right in the midst of my explanations to poor Hobby about the election. Some conversation society he’ll think the Apostles, if we persist in running about like chickens with our—good Lord,’ he finished, abruptly, because Keynes had turned about, eyes bulging, frog face contorted in misery. 

‘I couldn’t,’ Keynes said, and cleared his throat. Despite his expression he seemed to be attempting a tone appropriate to the delivery of a calculus proof. 

Strachey wheezed at him in frustration. Hands on his knees, cold air in his seizing lungs.

‘I couldn’t,’ Keynes repeated. ‘You must see, I had to leave, Lytton. If I’d stayed a moment longer I’d have kissed him, it would never have done.’

‘You’d have—!’ Strachey said, and then coughed, and gasped laughing, and coughed again, having forgotten all about his incipient asthma attack in the shock of the moment. 

When he had his breath back he straightened up, dignified. ‘You had to leave?’ he said. ‘You’d have kissed— _Hobby?_ ’ 

‘It can hardly come as a surprise,’ Keynes said, stiffly. He dragged his feet in the gravel under the arch. Quite the picture of amphibious dejection, thought Strachey, rolling his eyes now that he could breathe again. He himself strolled along, nonchalant, cane in hand.

‘ _Well_ ,’ Strachey said. ‘I suppose he’s nice enough looking. If that’s your kind of game. I, of course, hadn’t really _thought_ , but then—’ 

‘You—hadn’t really thought.’ Keynes’s voice was blank. He was backed deep into the shadows of the arch now, so that Strachey was caught off guard when his own swinging carefree foot connected with Keynes’s shin. Keynes just grunted. He didn’t move from his place. Strachey hopped backward, surprised.  

‘Well,’ Strachey repeated, stopped now on the gravel in the dark, at a loss. ‘I take, I suppose, an _interest_ in the boy. It’d be quite a feather in our cap, wouldn’t it, to put up the winning man for the Apostles? I mean to say, nobody is working harder to secure his election than I. He’s brighter than Sheppard gives him credit for. Has moments of real prescience, even, and, it’s only—what?’ because Keynes had grabbed his wrist in the dark.

‘Don’t,’ Keynes said.

There was an unaccustomed bite to the word. Strachey thought he could feel, on his face, in the dark, the warm mist of Keynes’s breath.

‘Pardon?’ 

‘Don’t,’ Keynes repeated. ‘Don’t say _prescient_ , you always say _prescient_ about people you’re trying to seduce.’

‘Good lord. What an accusation.’

‘Oh you know it’s _true_ , Lytton,’ Keynes sighed. ‘Do you need me to cite examples?’ His fingers still dug into Strachey’s wrist, so that Strachey was dragged forward a step when Keynes slumped back against the stone wall. Even now—when Strachey’s eyes, flicking aside, could make out the dim shapes of the Great Court on one side and the clattering intermittent traffic of Trinity Lane on the other—even now, Keynes was an undistinguished shadow. Invisible his bugging eyes; his ribbiting mouth in the night. 

‘I—honestly don’t,’ Strachey murmured. 

The dark blur made a broken noise against the wall. Strachey leaned toward it, despite himself. It was disturbing, he thought: Maynard Keynes, gasping against a wall.

‘I hadn’t thought of him that way. Really, Maynard.’ There was surprise in his voice. He was something akin to sincere. ‘My interest is—he’s a bright boy, I don’t—'

‘He’s a young Apollo,’ Keynes said, with a hitch in his voice. Strachey couldn’t be sure, but he thought, from the echo, that Keynes might be tipping his head back, hitting the back of it on the stone as punctuation. Keynes’s fingers still circled Strachey’s wrist, gripping tight.

‘He’s a fair enough young specimen, I grant you,’ Strachey said, ‘but I don’t—’

‘He’s the apogee of a thousand bloody years of thoroughbred horseflesh,’ Keynes said, skull against the stone again so that Strachey reached forward with his other hand to cushion the back of it. ‘Christ, he’s lovely, Lytton, how could you not?’

‘I,’ said Strachey, mind full of Keynes’s ragged breath in the dark, warm on his cheek. One could almost forget the man was ugly. Strachey’s own voice went strange in his ears.  ‘I hadn’t—Maynard.’

‘Lytton,’ Keynes panted. Close, Christ, warm and close and solid against Strachey’s chest and Strachey swayed into him in the dark. ‘He’s so—so _beautiful_ ,’ Keynes was saying, sounding like a different man, ‘and you had him—had him in your rooms, you’re going to—going to—’ 

Time stretched, breath held. Then the moment snapped. 

Strachey stepped back, decisive, heels crunching on the gravel drive. He breathed deep. Gave a quick, sharp nod.

‘I assure you, Maynard,’ he said, steady on again and relieved with it, ‘the idea had simply not occurred. I’ve no interest whatever in the pup. Convince Moore to elect him to the Apostles, and I’ll listen to him discourse on Cicero in raptures, and want for nothing.’

Keynes groaned again, against the wall. 

‘I’m not entirely convinced,’ came Keynes’s voice, muffled as if through his rubbing hands, ‘that Hobby even knows who Cicero was.’

Strachey laughed out. Coughed. The air was really quite cold.

‘Then we’ll educate him, shan't we?’ he said, and stepped back another foot back, and turned, walking away. ‘Hie you to the Eagle and Child, Maynard,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘And then skive off your economics lecture tomorrow and sleep it off. Do you a world of good.’

Keynes grunted. Strachey walked on, swinging his walking-stick, considering Arthur Hobhouse and his attainment or lack thereof to Apollonian proportions. Strachey really _hadn’t_ thought about the question, before.  

Not much.

He almost missed the sound of Keynes’s feet twisting on the gravel, and his reedy voice, more amused now, in its customary fastidious way, calling out: ‘You do realise I’m _delivering_ that lecture, don’t you, Lytton.’

Strachey smiled to himself, turning the corner back toward his rooms. 

‘Nonetheless, Maynard,’ he said. He waved his walking-stick in Keynes’s general direction. ‘Nonetheless.’

 

* * *

 

##  **February 1905  
**

**Trinity College, Cambridge  
****Lytton Strachey to Leonard Woolf**  

**The grave crisis is with Keynes. I saw him this afternoon, and told him nothing. I fear he may have guessed, and it would be wretched if he thought I was deceiving him. But why should I have told him? It was in the nature of a confidential communication—what passed between Hobby and me. […] But here am I, who eagerly sucked in Keynes’s own revelations, remaining mum when my turn arrives.**

* * *

‘Lytton?’ came a voice, a rap on the door. 

Strachey made a vague noise of permission in the back of his throat, one hand clutching his brandy glass and his eyes vague on the letter in his hand, before he remembered just what it was he was reading. 

‘Oh!’ he said. There was shuffling by the door; the knob rattled.

‘Er, um!’ he called out, shifting in his seat. 

Bother. 

His brain back-pedalled a few frantic seconds, then gave it up as a bad job. Surely every undergraduate had old love-letters under the mattress. This was Cambridge, after all; these were his own rooms. 

And then, after all, it turned out only to be Keynes.

‘You all right?’ said Keynes, just inside the doorway. 

‘Mmmm,’ Strachey said. Rubbed his eyes with one hand, gestured with the other, preoccupied. ‘Mmm, quite all right. Finish off the brandy. Pippa’s sent another up just yesterday which looks to be of superior vintage.’

‘I heard a rumour,’ said Keynes, righting a snifter and emptying the decanter, ‘that Hobby might be by.’

‘Insufficient attraction on my own, am I?’ Strachey murmured. Still sneaking glances at the old letter in his hand. ‘You missed him by an hour, Maynard. Here we were, from six to nine, and I swear we did nothing whatsoever but talk about you.’

‘About me? I don’t believe you for a moment.’ But his frog lips were wet with pleasure. Strachey didn’t have the heart to take it back.

‘Well,’ he said instead, looking down at his empty glass. ‘Believe what you will, and open the new bottle. We’ll—we’ll toast Apollo until his chariot gilds the heavens, shall we?’ 

Keynes chuckled and nodded, in his maiden-auntish way. He retrieved the bottle from the sideboard so that Strachey didn’t have to get up; though he did sit up, a bit, in his chair. Folded Sheppard’s letter; put it on the side table and gave it a little pat.

‘I need this tonight,’ Strachey said. ‘You know, when Hobby left I was feeling . . . oh! Awash on a sea of discontent, Maynard.’ 

‘Not _you_ , surely,’ said Keynes. Lamplight through the honeyed splash of brandy in his glass. 

‘Yes, yes,’ Strachey said. ‘It’s just—he’s so young, isn’t he? And so _pleasant_ ; Christ, I was never so pleasant, was I, Maynard? No, I see your look and I quite agree; I think I can’t have been. But I took down Sheppard’s old letters, just to be sure, since I recall feeling—at the time, you understand—as if he were the last word in worldly sophistication. And I but a country mouse, nibbling the crumbs from his table.’

‘Is that what they call it?’ Keynes said. 

Strachey laughed, unplanned, loud in the quiet room. He felt it shake off the last of his melancholy; and so he rose, and crossed to crack the casement on Nevile’s Court. Down below, two undergraduates called out to each other from amongst the stone and ivy.

‘Imagine my shock,’ said Strachey, turning back about with the cold air at his back, ‘to find, if these letters can be believed, that he really was properly in love with me back then, just as he should have been. To discover a thing like that, after all this time? After, oh, sitting in Classics lectures, and wondering if he ever thought about other people in order to get erections? Christ. The whole affair strikes me as ludicrous, now. Best to abjure love completely. I’m so far out of it I declare I never want to be in again.’

‘Are you,’ murmured Keynes. ‘You’d best shut the window, Lytton.’ 

Strachey downed his brandy. He turned. He shut the window. 

‘Are you _really_ in love with _Hobby_ , though, Maynard? I mean to say. Really in love?’

Keynes crossed one ankle over his wool-clad knee and Strachey felt, just for a moment, like a labrador frolicking at the man’s feet. Pestering him. It was unbecoming. He sat back in his own chair, and cleared his throat.

‘What have you got against Hobhouse?’ Keynes said at last.  

‘No, oh no, nothing at all!’ Strachey said. Collegiate, his back straight. ‘No, you misunder _stand_ me, Maynard. Aren’t I lobbying harder than anyone to make him an Apostle?’ 

‘Do you think I’m too good for him?’ mused Keynes, under his breath. ‘Or that he’s too good for me?’

‘I,’ said Strachey. 

Keynes just looked at him. Down the end of the corridor, Symington in his football boots crashed up the stairs. 

‘Not the latter,’ Strachey said, at last. He blew out his cheeks, and downed his brandy.

‘Why, Lytton.’ 

‘No, no, it’s only—I don’t—.’

He felt ridiculous. Deflated. But Keynes was looking at him with soft-bright eyes.

‘The time for such scruples is past, don’t you think, Lytton?’ he said at last. ‘We two should’ve known each other at Eton. That was the age for maundering about lost loves and worthiness.’ 

Strachey sighed, then chuckled. He pushed himself up out of his chair, and crossed to the sideboard for the bottle. 

‘Had I not been rotting away at Leamington, perhaps we would have done,’ he said. ‘But anyway I can’t see _you_ devoting much thought to your young school-friends at Eton. Golden boy Keynes, top of his class? Winner of every prize in the College? Did you, what? Why are you laughing? Have wet-dreams about Jeremy Bentham?’

‘Lytton!’ Keynes choked. He’d pulled his knees up into his chest. He could barely keep his glass steady from laughing. ‘On your honour never to suggest such a thing again.' 

‘No, honestly! I’m simply perishing of curiosity, Maynard. My so-called chums threatened me so often with a buggering, I’d forgotten there were boys less disgracefully lax about following through.’

‘Mmm,’ said Keynes. ‘If any man were wasted on absence from Eton, it’s you, Lytton. I look like a toad, and even I had Dan Macmillan squirming about on my mattress on a regular basis.’

‘You don’t look like a toad,’ lied Strachey. ‘And did you _really_?’ 

‘I did. It was all rather thrilling at first.’

‘At _first_?’ Strachey said. He sank back into his armchair, entranced, bottle on the floor. ‘And what then? The Duke of Albany arrived to sweep you off your feet?’

‘Oh, Macmillan had no conversation,’ Keynes said, then smiled at the face Strachey pulled. ‘Not in the way you’re thinking. He wasn’t slow-witted, he could speak quite well, actually. He just refused to do so with me. Every other night he’d come back to my rooms with me and let me strip him out of his breeches and his sailor suit and bend him over my little bed and just sink in up to my—’

‘ _Christ_ , Maynard.’ Strachey swallowed wrong; it burned, but he didn’t cough. His eyes watered.

‘But the whole time,’ went on Keynes, laughing a little, ‘he wouldn’t say a word. It unnerved me. I mean to say. Was he even enjoying himself? I’d have called the whole thing off, you know, if I hadn’t been sixteen at the time and ready to copulate with any—well. I wasn’t particular.’

‘This went on until you came up to Cambridge, then?’ 

‘Oh Lord, no. No, we were found out by one of the Maths tutors, and he—’

Strachey really did choke on his brandy, then. Keynes looked mildly concerned.

‘Oh!’ Keynes said, after a minute. ‘Oh no, I see your confusion. No, he didn’t catch us _in flagrante_ ; just coming up the stairs to my room at a mildly scandalous hour. We could’ve been, I don’t know, sneaking fags in the courtyard, or wine under our coats. But in any case, Macmillan would scarcely look at me after that.’

‘I shouldn’t wonder,’ said Strachey. ‘Probably wracked by guilt.’

‘Well if he was,’ Keynes said, stretching a bit in his chair, ‘I’d never know, as he wouldn’t say two words to me together. To this day I’ve no notion what motivated him. At times I still think about it. When I’ve nothing else on my mind.’

‘Not too frequently, then,’ Strachey said. 

Keynes chuckled, and drained his glass, and said, ‘Not too frequently. No.’

‘Then that was the extent of your,’ said Strachey, waving his glass in Keynes’s direction, ‘your schoolboy hijinx, was it, Maynard?’

‘Well,’ said Keynes, and was quiet, which would never stand.

‘It wasn’t!’ Strachey crowed. ‘It wasn’t in the least!’ 

He staggered to his feet and over to Keynes’s chair; refilled Keynes’s glass from the bottle. Keynes was chewing on his own lip. Unmoving. Strachey stood between his legs, hands full, staring down.

‘No,’ Keynes said, at last. He looked up, into Strachey’s face. ‘It wasn’t. There was also—you’ll be disappointed, Lytton, it’s not what you’re thinking. But there was also—Bernard Swithinbank.’

Strachey snorted. 

‘Goodness,’ he said. ‘The lad’s name alone makes up the story’s beginning and middle.’

That seemed to jolt Keynes out of his momentary melancholy. His look turned to a scowl. Strachey grinned. 

‘You,’ Keynes said, waving a not-quite-steady finger up at him, ‘ _you_ are called _Giles_ —’

‘All right, that’s enough,’ Strachey laughed, twisting away from Keynes’s poking hand.

‘Giles—Lytton—Strachey,’ Keynes went on. ‘And you call your sister _Pippa_ ; you’ve not a leg to stand on.’

‘Are you _drunk_ on a glass and a half of brandy?’ Strachey gasped, gleeful. Keynes’s prodding fingers had closed over his ribs, and he’d trapped them against his inner arm. 

‘Must be,’ Keynes giggled. He rested his forehead against Strachey’s belly. He giggled again, and again, hand on Strachey’s waist with Strachey’s elbow brushing his knuckles. And then, of all things: ‘Winthrop,’ he said. 

‘Are you going to be ill?’ Strachey asked. It was unexpected, to say the least.

Keynes only laughed harder. 

‘Honestly,’ Strachey said. ‘It’s not as if I’d mind, but this dressing gown is new.’ 

Keynes was making wet gasping noises, as if he were crying from mirth, but he tried to get himself in hand. He took deep breaths, turning his head to the side, cheek to Strachey’s navel. 

‘Winthrop,’ Keynes choked out at last, drawing back a fraction. His gaze flicked up to meet Strachey’s, his voice still quavering on a laughing note. Strachey felt a grin of his own try to join it. ‘Bernard—,’ said Keynes, and Strachey said ‘No!’ and Keynes said ‘Winthrop—,’ and then Keynes was laughing again, too hard to speak, so Strachey said ‘ _Bernard Winthrop Swithinbank_?’ putting on disbelief for effect, and Keynes nodded and nodded his laughing head, shoulders shaking, rubbing his face into Strachey’s belly.

Strachey found himself half-looking for a place to set down the brandy. When pressed, he had to admit an urge to bury his hands in Keynes’s hair. He gripped the bottle tighter. There was nothing incriminating, after all, about feeling fond.

Against his belly the convulsions lessened. He felt the rise and fall of Keynes’s shoulders as his breathing smoothed. Keynes looked up into Strachey’s face. 

‘So,’ Strachey murmured. Keynes’s eyes were _dark_. ‘This Bernard Swithinbank. Did you make him kneel on the cobblestones in his choirboy robes and suck you off against the whitewashed traces of Our Lady?’

‘Hmm,’ Keynes said. ‘No.’ He pulled back a little, enough to take up his glass and sip, thoughtful, though still one hand lingered at Strachey’s waist. 

‘It was,’ he went on, ‘almost—almost devoid of lust. At least for my part. But in a way I think there was more to it than there had been with Macmillan. I knew, at least, that he _wanted_ me, Lytton, he wanted my—my words, my mind. He was so obviously infatuated, and it was a new experience for me. Intoxicating. We read Bernard de Cluny together, “Jerusalem the Golden” for just hours, hours at a time. Language, and ideas, and—,’ and Keynes’s hand slid down, down to Strachey’s hip, ‘—and it seemed as if we made of my narrow little bed an entire _world_ , somehow. We would turn the lights out and just,’ and his breath caught, ‘talk, and kiss and—and kiss and _kiss_ until I could scarcely _see_.’ 

Keynes laughed, a little shaky. His fingers dug into Strachey’s hip, hard against the satin. Strachey’s tongue was thick in his mouth. He heard Keynes breathe in, long and slow. He felt him spread his hand wider so that his thumb pressed into the hollow between hipbone and belly. Strachey exhaled, sharp, with a little lost noise. He shut tight his eyes, and felt something slip from him, something hard, and brittle, and—and the next moment Keynes was cursing and jumping up, pushing Strachey back, stumbling, away from the chair. 

It had, after all, been the brandy bottle. It was lying in shards on the hardwoods. Liquid tunnelled into all their crevices. 

‘Bugger,’ Strachey said. 

‘Don’t move!’ Keynes called. He was rooting around in the sideboard for a rag. ‘You’re not wearing any shoes.’

‘I had—I’m not completely useless, you know,’ Strachey grumbled. But he stayed put. The pieces of glass really had ended up all about his feet. 

Keynes came back with flannels; picked his way over the mess. He began, first of all, by stemming the spread of brandy near the area rug, which Strachey had to admit that he probably would not have thought to do. Not that he said as much aloud.

‘We never did anything, besides,’ Keynes said, gathering up the glass shards from around Strachey’s feet. 

Strachey had—no idea, to what this comment referred. For a wild moment he thought it must be to the habitual cleaning up of broken brandy bottles from around the hearth-rugs of friends and acquaintances. From what he knew of the Keyneses, this seemed a preposterous claim. 

The confusion must have shown on his face. Keynes looked up and smiled, and said ‘Swithinbank and I, Lytton. Do try to keep up.’

‘Ah,’ Strachey said. He cleared his throat. Keynes tapped on his right foot, and he lifted it carefully; Keynes rested it on his own kneeling thigh. 

‘Ah,’ Strachey said again, at a loss. ‘Yes. You and, er. Bernard Swithinbank, Esquire, of the scintillating conversation.’

Keynes nested the small glass shards inside the larger ones, and soaked three rags sopping up the brandy. Then he lifted Strachey’s foot from off his own thigh, thumb against his arch, and replaced it on the floor.

‘Don’t disparage it until you’ve met him. Left foot, now.’ 

Strachey, skeptical of Swithinbank’s personal attractions, snorted; but lifted his left foot regardless. Then he gave a little squeal; Keynes’s fingers had tickled.

‘What are you implying about the merits of my conversation?’ Strachey said. ‘I’m wounded, Maynard, deeply wounded. Until I’ve the temerity to fly in the face of convention and grow a beard, my conversation is my leading asset. I shudder to think it’s not up to Swithinbankian standards.’

Keynes chuckled. He massaged Strachey’s heel a bit in apology, as he lowered his left foot back to the floor. 

‘Now stand there,’ he said, straightening up, ‘and tell me where you keep your socks.’

‘Oh _really_ Maynard, I’m not a child.’ 

‘Socks, Lytton.’

Strachey scowled, but the soles of his feet were tingling, and Keynes’s look was fierce. ‘Second drawer on the right,’ he sighed. Then he looked down at his own hand to discover, in surprise, that all this time he’d managed to keep hold of his glass. Improbably, it was still half-full of the last of the brandy. Strachey sipped in a dignified fashion, as Keynes located a pair of trouser socks and brought them over to him, along with his brogues. Strachey gestured helplessly with the glass, so Keynes wedged the whole lot under Strachey’s left arm, then took the glass from his right, threw it down his throat in one huge swallow, and set it safely on the mantel. Strachey couldn’t help but be impressed.

‘Dangerous style of living, throwing brandy bottles about’ Strachey remarked, slipping his right foot into sock and then into brogue. ‘I shouldn’t wonder if I catch an earful from Bakersfield on the next floor down.’

‘My heart is all a-flutter for you, Lytton.’

‘Not to worry, I’ve plenty of practice appeasing him.’

‘I probably oughtn’t to ask.’

‘No,’ said Strachey, slipping into his second brogue and feeling suddenly at liberty in the world. ‘You probably wouldn’t like it, Maynard. There are sometimes _ladies_ involved, or if not exactly ladies, at least—’ 

‘You and Hobby didn’t really talk about me tonight,’ Keynes said. ‘Did you, Lytton?' 

‘Er,’ Strachey said. After the brandy he somehow didn’t have it in him for prevarication. ‘Not . . . per se. No.’

Keynes nodded. Breathed in, and out. Crossed to the sideboard and poured out two shots of gin, and drank them both, one after the other. Then he turned about, to look Strachey in the face.

‘Well. It was kind of you, anyway,’ he said. ‘Telling me you had.’

And Strachey watched, at a loss, as Keynes moved near-steadily from the sideboard, to the bed, to the chair, gathering up his coat and hat. He stood at the hearth and opened his mouth to object, to invite Keynes back in, to create some brilliant fiction transforming Hobby and their sordid, trivial little flirtation, but by that time Keynes, weaving gently, was already out the door.

 

* * *

 

**Lytton Strachey to Leonard Woolf**  
**Trinity College, Cambridge**

**And then, when their talk was ending, Keynes would lie down on the bed, and embrace [Swithinbank] and kiss him, and kiss him, and kiss him, again and again; and so they would part at last. I don’t know—the image of our ugly Keynes makes all this rather ridiculous—and rather pathetic too. The vision of the dark room and the white bed and the curious ecstasy there I find attractive—soothing in a strange way.**

**These last three pages are I suppose unparalleled in the annals of known correspondence. How many persons do they put under criminal imputations? What scandals! What disclosures! And yet Heaven knows there’s nothing abnormal in the whole account. It’s only that I happen, for the first time, very likely, in the world’s history to give the account. And aren’t you touched by it? Poor little Swithinbank could never quite believe that he wasn’t doing something wrong when he let himself be kissed. The brutes! The devils! To such a length have they carried their abominable perversions of things! They were the best moments of his life.  
**

* * *

##  **March 1905**

‘Farewell, then,’ said Arthur Hobhouse. Strachey, pausing on the path, felt a surge of annoyance. 

Here it was, he thought, irrelevantly: it was starting to rain. And why, after all, say _farewell_ when one was only just nineteen, and a simple goodbye would sit so nicely on one’s lips? 

‘Yes,’ Strachey bit out. (Hobby was looking at him like a spaniel pup.) ‘I’ll see you later. At the Apostles, no doubt, now that you’re officially elected.’

Hobby beamed. It was all Strachey could do to force his mouth into a smile. 

And yet, when the boy’s golden head had vanished, bobbing beneath the Great Court galleries, Strachey felt oddly bereft. He walked on, getting nowhere, slowing his steps over the Bridge of Sighs and doing, fruitlessly, as its name instructed. 

Hobby was dull, Strachey thought, angrily. He was tedious. He understood, at a charitable estimation, less than half of Strachey’s references. He said he preferred to read Aristotle in _translation_. It took all of Strachey’s considerable skill just to keep a conversation afloat; and he invariably longed, when Hobby was speaking, to be somewhere, _anywhere_ , else.

Yet ever since that evening with Keynes, beneath the darkened arches of Trinity, Strachey hadn’t been able to let him go. It was absurd. He spent half his time with Hobby, wishing himself away, and the other half away from Hobby, thinking, compulsively, of where the boy might be going; of what he might be doing; of whom he might be doing it with. 

Strachey banged the knob of his walking-stick peevishly along the bridge’s crenellations. He twisted his mouth, looking down.

Below, the River Cam stretched out before him. Great fat raindrops streaked and stained the old stone; plunked into water and echoed out and out. A harried pair of punters hunched up their shoulders, making for shore. Unwinding along his line of sight were nothing but arches ensouled, and twisting, tempting waterways; and yet somehow the world seemed such a small, such a futile place. 

He wondered, out of habit, if Hobby’s meeting this afternoon at the Kitchen Office had been a blind. If there were, perhaps, some flirtatious young Girton undergraduate, waiting to meet him in an out-of-the-way niche of the Great Court. 

 _Christ_ , Strachey thought, bringing his fist down on stone. How was he—how _could_ he be—in love with Arthur Hobhouse? And how, being in love—being in love, no less, with a golden-haired youth, a boy with open green eyes and thighs like slender shaking birches: how, then, could he feel his world contracting around him? How could it be thus, when bland old Sheppard had once seemed to him the moon and stars? How could it be thus when Keynes had said—when ugly Keynes had said that just lying on a dark bed, kissing Bernard Winthrop Swithinbank—who was bound, Strachey thought spitefully, to be spotty, and spindly, and utterly lacking in anything resembling wit—when just talking and kissing had made of Keynes’s narrow Eton bed a whole wide wondering world?

Yet so it seemed, standing in the rain on the Bridge of Sighs, as drops dripped down his collar-back and the punters splashed beneath him. 

So it seemed. 

He was in love! Strachey thought, pinching himself. In love! He shook out all his limbs, and stirred his feet to motion. He ought to—to run, or—or float, or grab some shopkeep by the apron-strings and stuff his pipe with fine tobacco. He ought to be in ecstasies. He ought—hurrying along the embankment, and back through Nevile’s Court—he ought to be miserable, compellingly. He was in love! He had no notion of where his feet were taking him. He ought to be driven on to relentless motion. He thought of nothing but the boy both day and night. He ought to be agonised with indecision; or else (drawing up short on the green) to proclaim his love from the rooftops, to all his friends and acquaintances.

Exhausting notion.

But really, he thought, looking about him and realising vaguely that he was standing on the lawn of the Old Court: really, he’d come all this way. He was almost to King’s, now, and wet to the skin. And it was nearly time for tea. 

Ridiculous: being in love at tea-time.

He trailed in the doors of King’s. He trudged up the stairs. Most definitely _not_ in anything resembling transports. If only he could be angry; really _seething_ ; really _wild_ with anger: at Hobby, at Keynes. At himself. He remembered being angry, once, at Sheppard in a snow-storm. He’d never felt so warm. He thought of it now as he coughed wetly into his wet handkerchief, standing in the corridor, giving two defeated little knocks before pushing wide the door.

And there was Keynes, sitting at his desk. Finishing a sentence, and placing his pen at a fussy, careful angle in the stand, and blotting his paper neat before turning, at last, to regard Strachey where Strachey was dripping on his entrance rug.

‘Lytton.’ His frog eyes bulged. ‘Good lord.’

‘It’s raining,’ said Strachey, unnecessarily. 

‘I’ve known you two years,’ Keynes tutted, ‘and you’ve had pneumonia _thrice_.’

‘I’m in love,’ Strachey said. 

Keynes clucked. He sucked in his lips. He went to the wardrobe for a spare dressing-gown, which he tossed in Strachey’s direction.

‘Well,’ amended Strachey tiredly, grabbing for it and then just holding it, limply in his hand. ‘A bit in love. Or no, almost in love—that is, I—I think it’s love, though it might only be despair. And now—’ 

Keynes, in agitated disapproval, watched him be wracked by a coughing fit.  

‘I assume this is about Hobby,’ Keynes said, stiffly, when Strachey had subsided, and then: ‘Don’t you dare collapse on that chair, you’ll crush the velvet.’

Strachey tried for a baleful look as he dragged himself down the corridor to the WC, to peel out of his wet things. 

He latched the door with a click. But Keynes must have followed him to the threshold, because Strachey heard Keynes’s voice, low and hard by Strachey’s head, hissing, ‘I knew it, it’ll be just like Holroyd all over again, I bloody knew you’d be after him as soon as I told you how I felt.’ 

Strachey groaned. His chest hurt, and his feet. Keynes’s fingers drummed a nervous tattoo on the wood of the WC door.

‘Just what you’re on about, Lytton,’ he said, ‘I’ll never know. I’m not so dense as to take you seriously when you rabbit on about ‘so far out of love I never want to be in it’ and such nonsense but I don’t—if it’s not an outright lie, are you simply a turncoat by nature? What happens, exactly, in your perverse little schoolgirl mind, that makes my favourites so irresistible to you?’ 

Strachey’s clothes were a sodden heap of grey on the white. He slumped naked, back against the door, and listened to Keynes’s voice working itself up into a spitting temper. 

‘What ever happened,’ Keynes was saying, ‘to “He’s a fair enough young specimen, I grant you,” and “I’ve no interest whatever”? You swore it up and down, Lytton, and really, why bother if you were just going to—'

‘Why did you tell me, then?’ Strachey groaned into the empty room. Face in his hands. ‘It’s not as if I asked.’

The drumming on the door slowed. Stopped.

Keynes didn’t answer.

Strachey waited five seconds, six, and drew a breath—careful, careful, so the coughing wouldn’t start. He pushed himself off the door, feeling he’d scored a point in some ill-defined contest, and picked up Keynes’s dressing gown from off the toilet. He slung it around his shoulders. When he opened the door again, Keynes had gone.

Not far, though.

‘I suppose you’ll be expecting biscuits or something,’ Keynes fumed, as Strachey padded back over the threshold and shut the door behind him. ‘Which I haven’t got. I wasn’t expecting anyone, least of all my self-appointed, I don’t know, rival apparent, as if I needed the challenge, showing up soaked with—ah,’ he said, emerging from the little kitchen cradling a teapot, two cups dangling from his fingers. He harrumphed. 'You look a bit drier, anyway.’

Strachey relieved Keynes of the cups. He folded himself into the velvet chair, and put the cups on the side table, feeling he could sleep for a week. Keynes lowered himself into the chair opposite. Regarded Strachey over the tops of the cups and the teapot with a kind of amphibian exasperation. That look, Strachey thought: it was quite uniquely Keynesian. One could have no doubt, when one received it, that one was being glared at by Maynard Keynes. 

Strachey wondered idly if he might be going mad. He was so tired. He rested his chin on his propped-up hands and listened to the clank of china.

‘You really are the most exasperating—,’ Keynes was saying, pouring out the tea, harrumphing continuously. ‘I mean to say. I suppose one could argue, from a perspective of political economy, that—’

‘A perspective of what, I beg your pardon?’ said Strachey, but he was too tired to achieve the proper weight of indignation. His _lungs_ hurt. He thought about frogs in the pond down the long lawn from Lancaster Gate; about James, catching them in the Springtimes of their childhood and chasing Lytton back into the house, waving the things about. Their eyes had bulged out in just the way Keynes’s were doing, now.

‘—that a bit of self-interested competition in the free market only ever helped the thing along,’ Keynes was saying, talking over him. ‘But really, Lytton. Who _behaves_ in this—this impossible manner?’

‘Who falls in love,’ mumbled Strachey, into his tea, ‘from the perspective of political economy?’

Keynes scowled. Strachey attempted not to cough. 

‘Well,’ Keynes said. ‘I’ll just have to press my suit, to Hobby, before you move in.’

Strachey nodded, waved a languid hand. He brought it down, drifting through the cup’s steam, until it rested on the side-table and tapped on the saucer in a quiet clacking rhythm. A reassuringly domestic sound. Very indoors. Cosy. Dry.

‘What are your plans, in that regard?’ asked Keynes. 

Clickety. Clickety. Clack. He shivered, and coughed. Keynes sighed.

‘Come now, Lytton, it’s a bit late to call a moratorium on—on fraternising with the enemy, isn’t it? And what do you mean, in any case, “a bit in love”? How can one be “almost in love”? One is or one isn’t, surely.’

Clickety-clack. Clack. Clack. James had squeezed the frogs’ middles, Strachey remembered. Their throats had distended. Pippa had cried.

‘It really is a rather strange reaction, you know, Lytton,’ Keynes said. ‘Objectively speaking. Wading through a rainstorm to tell _me_ when you find we’re “almost in love” with the same boy.' 

Strachey’s thumb, near scalded against hot china, was shocked into stillness. Somehow he hadn’t. Hadn’t thought. Hobby himself, he realised belatedly, was studying in the Kitchen Office. Mere yards from the entrance to King’s.

‘Well,' Strachey said at last, clearing his throat with a little laugh, looking up into Keynes’s black eyes. ‘Give it a bit of time, you know, Maynard. Give it a bit of time. Being really in love does at least keep one’s energy up, among other things. And you know I’m incurably lazy.’

Keynes tutted. He refilled Strachey’s tea. On the window-pane and the courtyard and the River Cam, the rain beat down.

 

* * *

 

 **Lytton Strachey to Leonard Woolf  
** **Trinity College, Cambridge**

**I walked out with Hobby on Monday. We got as far as the Observatory, when it began to rain; we turned back, and, when we parted at the Kitchen Office, I felt a hideous void. It came upon me suddenly that I was bored with everything, with every look, with every thought—everything, you know, except him. I went round to Keynes, seething and wild. I half let him know that I was almost as much in love with Hobby as he … On Tuesday Keynes burst in, radiant. I wondered vaguely what was up; he beamed and talked at me from the fireplace in a wild confused way—for Keynes, and then I realised it. He’d, as he said, ‘proposed.’ And been accepted.  
**

* * *

##  **June 1905**

So saccharine it blistered, thought Strachey, fastening his trouser flies. So sweet it sickened: the spectacle of them together. Hobby blushing in his mussed curls, smoothing them down. Keynes’s mouth berry-stained these days, and never mind the season.

Strachey straightened his tie in the mirror. Stepped back to look. Frowned.

The dinner jacket struck him as a bit musty, now. Odd. It had seemed perfectly acceptable in the bosom of Trinity. But once transplanted to rarefied Oxford air…Strachey always forgot how the look of things changed. Even for a house party week-end at Balliol. Even amongst friends. He felt quite, _quite_ the poor relation. Quite out of things. Last Thursday he’d come suddenly into his rooms, and found them sprawled on his own bed, Hobby’s hand down the front of Keynes’s trousers. 

‘Lytton!’ Keynes had cried, flushed, scrambling to fasten himself back up. ‘We were absolutely _dying_ to invite you out to the Eagle. Thought we’d wait for you. Here.’

Hobby, Strachey noticed, had had the grace to look contrite. He’d stood awkwardly by Strachey’s side table. He’d held his guilty hand out to his side: careful; apologetic; not touching any of Strachey’s things. Then he'd ruined the effect by cleaning his fingers with his tongue. 

Keynes, for a moment, had looked almost proud.

It would be for the best, thought Strachey, emptying his pockets onto the rust-coloured coverlet. For the best, this week-end away. Four days not plagued by the exhibition they made: Hobby punting Keynes down the Cam; Hobby on Keynes’s knee in Hobby’s rooms; an envelope wedged in the door of Keynes’s rooms for days at a time, to warn away all comers. To warn away Strachey: who was, _occasionally_ , thinking of something entirely unrelated when he passed by; but whose mind, at the sight of the cream laid paper, would invariably be dragged back down to the deeps.

He made a face now, at his suit in the mirror. But that was the second supper gong; it would have to do. The last time some poor bastard had been late, Alys had spent the entire evening tetchy; and Strachey had spent it thanking his stars for Bertrand’s claret. _Females_ , Strachey thought, adjusting his tie on his way down the side stairs. It was best not to cross them. 

And he could only assume there would be simply hordes of them, if _he_ had been Alys’s best last-minute option to make up the masculine numbers. He hadn’t even had a chance to bathe properly, between receiving the telegram in his rooms, packing his smallest trunk, and passing Keynes’s cream-laid envelope on his way out to the train station. He wasn’t sure, in fact, following the sounds of false laughter and a tinkling mediocre piano rendition of ‘Tell Me, Pretty Maiden,’ who else might be in attendance.

So he was surprised to come around the corner to such a delightful quantity of black. And many of them—well, thought Strachey. Young.

‘Lytton!’ Alys crowed, swooping down from the sideboard in red velvet, ‘you’ve arrived, at last!’ just as a young man with a cloud of freckles and a shock of wavy red hair looked up from the sofa in recognition, and the stocky blond at the piano, reaching his hand up into the treble over the bare arms of a laughing brunette in green, flubbed his notes for looking over his shoulder. 

‘Alys,’ Lytton said, kissing her cheek, raising his eyebrows. ‘You’ve no _notion_ how ecstatic I was to drop everything the moment I got your wire.’

‘Oh _Lytton_ ,’ she said, scrunching up her face as if he didn’t mean it. Bertrand came around her other side, then, followed by a dark, willow-thin young man with huge brown eyes and tailoring that simply _had_ to be French. He was, to perfect the image, carrying an extra glass of claret. 

‘Lytton counts on you thinking he’s joking, Alys,’ Bertrand said, leaning in and offering a hand. ‘You should either take everything he says utterly seriously, or discount all of it out of hand.’

Strachey smiled, and shook Bertrand’s hand. He took the extra wine glass from the dark young man as Bertrand was saying ‘Always much more amusing to opt for the former, I find,’ and Alys was talking over him saying ‘Well! Now that you’ve arrived I’ll just go find Prescott and announce supper,’ so that Strachey had to make a face at the young man over the rim of his glass rather than introduce himself properly. The young man covered his mouth with his hand, as if surprised by his own laughter. 

Across the room the pianists were moving on to ‘The Countess of Alagazam.’ Another set of notes was flubbed, and the dark young man looked about, vaguely, as if he couldn’t quite be bothered to locate the source of all the noise. His eyes blinked slowly. Sleepily, Strachey thought. Like a cat’s. 

Strachey cleared his throat.

‘Oh!’ the young man said. He looked back around; found Strachey still planted before him like a tree. ‘I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure.’ Strachey smiled. He wet his lips, transferring his claret to his left hand, when a cacophony of laughter erupted from the piano end of the room and the young man’s head jerked away again. The green-clad brunette had somehow fallen off the end of the bench. A result, apparently, of a practical joke by a braying blonde American girl in cropped hair and harem pants. 

‘Well,’ said the dark young man, in his slow, careful voice, still looking over at Green Dress, sprawled on the floor. ‘It wasn’t quite Jerusalem the golden all jubilant with song, in any case. Was it?’ And he smiled a sleepy grin to go with his eyes.  

‘I—’ Lytton said, stomach tightening, his hand on the young man’s wrist, ‘we haven’t been properly—,’ but then Prescott cleared his throat at the top of the hall, and they all took their places to file into supper.

Which is how Strachey found himself halfway through supper, sandwiched between the green-clad brunette and her American tormentor, and just across the table from a very pretty, very vague, very beguiling young scholar whose name it was becoming increasingly awkward not to have caught. Whose eyes were dark pools that Strachey—that Strachey couldn’t catch, at the moment; because the young man had bent his ear to his grey-haired neighbour, and was listening to her go on about the pinks in her garden.

‘Pardon me,’ said America, at Strachey’s left elbow. He turned to face her waspish smile. ‘I’m sorry to be a bother,’ she said, nodding across his lap at Green Dress, ‘but Elea _nora_ has decided to hog the salt.’

‘I beg your—,’ said Strachey, then turned to his right, as a shaker was deposited with undue force in his bewildered palm.

‘I merely supposed,’ said Eleanora, glaring past Strachey with eyes like the Aegean, her hand still on the crystal shaker, ‘that _Florence_ was already quite salty enough, without any help from the rest of us.’ 

His mouth, Strachey realised, was open. He closed it, nonplussed, and looked up across the table just in time to catch the dark young man looking right at him, with his knuckles over his smiling mouth and his cat’s eyes curled up at the corners. The youth flicked his gaze from Florence, to Eleanora. When Strachey raised his eyebrows, the young man laughed out. Jerusalem the golden after all, thought Strachey, as he turned to bestow upon Florence the salt, and said ‘Don’t tell me,’ in his best Cambridge manner, ‘but I’ve ever such a sneaking suspicion that _you_ two have _met_.’

They had indeed. In Rome, it transpired, on holiday: and had apparently spent the bulk of it thwarting their mothers and eluding their suitors, in order to gallivant and bicker together in the shade of the Coliseum.   

‘Lytt, it was just _smashing_ ,’ Flo told him (for American mores seemed to call for the abandonment of most of the letters in one’s name, like so many cumbersome scarves). ‘Oh, all the red roofs! And the blue, _blue_ sky. I’ve never _seen_ a sky so blue.’

‘Oh heavens, not even in New _York_?’ Nora drawled from Strachey’s other side, rolling her eyes, draining her glass yet again. ‘I was under the impression there was _nothing_ one couldn’t see in in New York.’

Flo stuck out her pink little tongue. 

Strachey, very bland, said, ‘The Roman sky _is_ unreasonably blue, I quite agree. Particularly, I find, with a blue-eyed lover’—at which Nora blanched a little, and Flo choked on her wine. ‘Difficult to find, though,’ Strachey went on, ‘the Romans being naturally so dark. I’ve always preferred to locate one ahead of time, for importation along with my trunks.’

‘I—daresay you have,’ Nora said, oceanic eyes trained on his face, slowly smiling. Her glass was half-empty again already.

‘Quite right,’ Strachey said. He toasted her; Flo cleared her throat disapprovingly. The dark young man was nodding to his neighbour, but he glanced up for a moment as Strachey turned to face Flo; and the grandfatherly man on Nora’s other side tried for Bertrand’s attention; and and Bertrand signalled to Alys; and the dinner party wound on all around them. Strachey flashed a smile across the table.

‘Well, I thought it was just lovely,’ Flo was saying, peevishly, ‘The old ruins, so romantic, and the little markets and everything, the fresh fish market in Campo dei F—’

‘Sant’Angelo,’ Nora corrected, ‘you always get it wrong. Fiori for flowers, it’s not difficult. You bought me violets for my—’

‘—Sant’Angelo, then. Lord, nothing’s ever tasted so good. I could’ve spent a year if it hadn’t been for Mother. Only, Nora insisted on lugging her paints with her wherever we went. Hard to make a getaway with an easel and a messy old palette, when—’

‘I only _wanted_ them,’ Nora interrupted, spluttering, unsteady, ‘because of the way you—you looked in that orange dress with the—’ 

At which point, mercifully, Alys rose from the table. Nora stopped speaking, flushed pink all the way up into her masses of hair, and used the table to push herself up to her feet. Strachey watched Flo crowd up behind her. When they passed through the door to the sitting room, she bent her platinum head and whispered in Nora’s ear, her hand on Nora’s green-silk waist. Strachey sighed.

Behind him, Bertrand was fussing about with the cigar-clippers. Strachey turned about, only to come face-to-face with a quantity of very red hair.

‘Lytton!’ the ginger boomed, grinning.

So Lytton smiled, and said, ‘Beazley, is it? Do I recall our meeting at Keynes’s rooms? Was it—was it after the exams for Michaelmas term, or—’ but Beazley was neither looking at him, nor listening—not, at least, in any way that precluded talking himself, at a rapid pace and a considerable volume. 

‘It was just after the _exams_!’ he said, ‘For Michaelmas term, what? Fancy, not having seen either of you in all that time. Tempus fugit and all that, what? I was just saying to my old—’ 

But Strachey was only half-listening, letting Beazley’s hand on his elbow lead him on. Instead he craned his head about, with the idea of fleeing in the direction of the dark young scholar. There was Bertrand, making the rounds with the box of cigars; and there the pudgy grandfatherly type already dozing on the settee; and—there, Strachey thought, with a flutter in his chest. There he was, by the hearth. Deep in seemingly in uproarious conversation with the stocky blond pianist, quite doubled over with laughter in fact, and—and Strachey had been so preoccupied with observing him, that he’d neglected to notice Beazley leading him right to the pair.

‘And the third,’ the blond pianist was choking out, around his tears, ‘when he took it into his head to, and I quote, _perfect_ the rules of—'

‘—Wall Game!’ the dark scholar cut in, at which they both redoubled their laugher, the scholar’s hand on the pianist’s shoulder. _Eton_ , thought Strachey: ‘Wall Game’ meant Eton, though annoyingly he still understood too little to be in on the joke.

He was the only one, however. Even Beazley seemed to be having no trouble following. Strachey looked at him in consternation. But he was chuckling outright now, in an irksomely knowing sort of a way, and neither explanations nor introductions seemed forthcoming.

‘Lord, the _effort_ he put into those new rules,’ the pianist was gasping. ‘’T'would’ve been an entire course-load for anyone else, but of course he went on to sit the Tomline exam that same third.’

‘And won it,’ Beazley put in. ‘And then gave us all a damned—a damned statistical presentation on the blasted Wall Game that same—’

‘Yes!’ howled the pianist. ‘Oh Christ, yes, I’d forgotten that bit.’

‘Probably because you were falling-down drunk,’ Beazley pointed out, in a reasonable tone. 

‘May’ve had something to do with it,’ agreed the pianist. ‘But Lord, I do remember enjoying myself that night. The charts! So many _numbers_ , I hadn’t seen so many numbers since I took my Classics specialisation and dropped maths. What was he arguing again?’ 

‘Oh, something about the scrims,’ said the scholar, waving a hand, ‘and the loophole by which a single player could hold up the whole game by just sitting on the ball. Which _I_ always thought,’ he went on, thoughtfully, while the pianist started giggling uncontrollably again, ‘was rather ironic, considering that Maynard himself had pulled off that move to great acclaim in the big match against Oppidan.’

Strachey, choking noisily on his cigar smoke, was too shocked even to enjoy the sensation of the willowy young scholar patting him on the back. 

‘Maynard _Keynes_?’ he said, choking and grimacing. Of all the bloody—. But who else could it be? Who bloody else, thought Strachey, wheezing now with his hands on his knees, could it possibly be, having sat the Tomline and won it, and then given a statistical presentation with charts and graphs, on the ideal rules for Wall Game?

‘Well, yes,’ the scholar was saying, soothingly, still rubbing his back. ‘I mean. Have you met the man?’ and Strachey started coughing and gasping all over again.

‘Yes,’ he said at last, grimly, when he was stood up again on his own two feet, and the scholar had withdrawn his hand. ‘I have indeed.’

‘Well!’ said the pianist, with a gesture as if Strachey, in this case, undoubtedly knew the matter inside and out. ‘You’ll know how he is about numbers, then.’ 

Strachey felt his back go wooden.

‘I’m sure,’ Beazley said, looking at him, ‘that Lytton is aware of how Maynard is with numbers.’

‘Remember the time,’ drawled the scholar, ‘he presented Hurst with, what did he call it? _Some Investigations About the Comparative Lengths of some Long Poems_? Lines, words, statistically significant repetitions, Morris to Milton, all neatly tabulated. I thought Hurst might _cry_ from happiness.’

‘Remember Hurst’s face,’ said the pianist, ‘when Maynard said he wasn’t going to specialise in maths?’

‘I believe I actually observed the instant when his heart split in two,’ the scholar said.

‘Banned from sitting for the maths prizes since our third year, and he doesn’t even go in for it!’ rumbled Beazley, nodding his head. ‘But he still predicted the results among the rest of us with _remarkable_ accuracy.’

‘Well,’ said the scholar, looking askance at the pianist with a twist to his lip. ‘There’s also, of course.’ He coughed. ‘His journal.’

The pianist turned bright red, which Strachey found . . . odd. Here, at least, he felt on even footing: Keynes still kept his horrible, fussy little journal, and it was, as advertised, predictably full of meaningless figures. Times of trains; his own temperature at waking, mid-day, and bed; financial incomings; financial outgoings; precise accounts of minutes spent writing; spent eating; spent walking; spent teaching. Insufferable. But not, thought Strachey, actually _embarrassing_.

‘Times of bowel movements, that kind of thing?’ said Beazley, but the scholar was shaking his head.

‘No, no,’ he said, in his sleepy, smoke-deepened voice. ‘The _other_ journal.’

‘The other journal?’ said Strachey, surprised out of his silence. Beazley looked taken aback, while the pianist, apparently, tried to sink through the floor. 

‘Oh yes,’ smirked the scholar. ‘Has he never showed it to you? What a shame. Started it with Dan here, I believe.’

The pianist made a noise like a dying bird, not meeting anyone’s eyes. Strachey felt his eyebrows approaching his hairline. Such a mystery was worth even being reminded of Keynes at the house where he’d come explicitly to escape the man. His vague feeling of pity was eclipsed by the wild need to laugh, and he utterly ignored the tickle at the back of his skull at the name _Dan_. 

‘Yes indeed,’ the young scholar continued. ‘Encoded, of course, but quite worth the bother of locating a maths fellow with a modicum of discretion, to decipher it. A record of all Maynard’s sexual experiments since the age of fifteen. Vital statistics, of course: dates and times; weights and approximate…lengths, along with—’

‘No!’ said Beazley, chuckling; but the scholar was still talking.

‘—a personal shorthand of possible acts,’ he was saying, ‘organised by a strict taxonomy for later tracking over time, and with an in-built notational system recording who, er . . . performed which role.’ 

Strachey threw his head back; laughed up at the ceiling, exasperated. _Christ,_ he thought. _Maynard._

‘And of course,’ the scholar was continuing, laconic, as ‘Dan’ tried to curl into a ball of freckled blond misery on the hearth-rug, ‘a short series of marks for various qualitative aspects of the encounter, both from his own perspective, and, to the best of his abilities to discern, from that of his partner.’

‘What?’ said Beazley, ‘does he finish up and ask the fellow to rate it on a scale of one to ten?’

‘You talk like that’s out of the question,’ murmured Strachey. ‘But how is it,’ he said to the scholar, ‘that _you_ know so much about this—this encoded sex journal, or what-not? I mean. He hasn’t even shown the thing to _me_.’

‘Oh, well,’ the scholar said, ‘I helped him develop it.’ 

‘You helped him— _pardon_?’ Strachey said, just as Beazley, next to him, jumped so far into the air that he nearly spilled his drink. 

‘Good Lord,’ he said, ‘I’m _so_ sorry, I think I must be a bit drunk. Lytton, this is Dan Macmillan,’ gesturing to the flushed and spluttering pianist, ‘and this—' but the scholar was already holding out his hand. 

 _Winthrop_ , Strachey thought hysterically, grasping slim dark fingers in his own, as the scholar said,

‘Bernard Swithinbank,’ looking right at Strachey with his sleepy cat’s eyes rimmed round with lashes. ‘So pleased to make your acquaintance.’

 

* * *

 

 **Lytton Strachey to Leonard Woolf  
** **Balliol College, Oxford**

**I’m drifting off again toward the borderland of frenzy—but how can I describe what’s certainly happened? After all it comes merely to this—that I have found Swithinbank charming, and that I’ve hardly dared, for the three hours I’ve been with him, to open my mouth. I like him so much, I’m attracted so unmistakably—oh, not in the manner of the flesh. I believe that my soul is diseased in a curious and distressing way—it has no skin, it’s raw, and every touch upon it agonises a nerve. […] If you could then see ‘Dan’ Macmillan grinning and twinkling, and remember, as you looked at him, of the marvellous prolonged affair with the Etonian Keynes—if you could sweep in a few insignificant stop-gaps—if you could gather the whole of Swithinbank’s delightful, delicate, untainted charm, his surprising quickness, his humour, his kindness—it’s no good, it’s simply ridiculous, and I resign.**

* * *

 

Strachey felt, the rest of that evening, lost in some delightful opiate haze. _Swithinbank_ , he thought, and then: _Macmillan_. So much had happened—so much could potentially happen—that all he found himself capable of actually _doing_ , was to make his excuses soon after they rejoined the ladies, and to waft upstairs—where he wrote a wandering, wild-eyed letter to the spectre of Leonard, slaving away in some sweltering colonial office halfway across the world. 

So it wasn’t until the following morning, after breakfast, when Flo and Nora had slipped away to Christ Church Meadow on a painting expedition with Strachey's cousin Duncan (quite grown these days) as their conveniently distractible chaperon, and Alys and Bertrand had taken most of the rest of the party to an organ recital at St. John’s, that Strachey prepared to go in search of Swithinbank. In the event he needn’t have bothered, because Swithinbank, against all odds, came in search of him. 

‘Oh!’ Strachey said, and jumped a foot. He’d come up to change into day clothes, lost in his own thoughts; turned round and was confronted with the whole willowy young length of Swithinbank propped against his door jamb. His face heated. 

‘I thought perhaps I might go for a—,’ Strachey said, just as Swithinbank said ‘I wondered if you fancied a walk—,’ at which they both burst out laughing, and shook on it. 

Strachey had considered suggesting a discreet indoor location, rather than a walk. But it was, truly, one of the first glorious Summer days, and the whole of Oxford was resplendent. They set out to the north, talking vaguely of joining the others at the recital. As it happened, though, they were deep in conversation when they reached St. John’s: laughing about Swithinbank’s Eton days, and just what exactly—for Strachey had never properly understood—was the appeal of the mysterious ‘Wall Game.’ So they walked right through the strains of Bach emerging from the chapel doors, and on and on, through the yards and back-roads, and then, sinking into the soft, sun-warmed grass, across the open park-land to end up in a shaded alder grove, at some remove from Lady Margaret Hall. 

They sat together in a little grassy, three-sided outbuilding, away from the path. It might, once, have been a changing-room for amateur theatricals; ladies changing garments were afforded remarkable privacy. 

Swithinbank in the dappled light was laughing. Still talking of the depths of treachery resorted to by lads at Wall Game. His _lashes_ , thought Strachey. (They hadn’t met a soul, for half an hour together.) His _mouth_ , Strachey thought, and lost the train of the conversation for seconds at a time; so that when Swithinbank’s voice rose on a question, Strachey had to blush, and stammer, and could have asked him to repeat himself, but instead leaned over and kissed his full and laughing lips. And Swithinbank made the most delicious sound, of intrigue and of utter satisfaction, and lay back on the grass with Strachey stretched out above him, kissing the brindled light off his skin.

This was _Swithinbank_ , thought Strachey, tasting his mouth. _Keynes’s_ Swithinbank. This long, lithe, dappled-dark body melting into his own body was Swithinbank’s body; these sleepy cinnamon eyes were Swithinbank’s eyes. And oh he was—was _lovely_ , Strachey thought, fingers hard on Swithinbank’s warm stomach, Swithinbank groaning softly into his mouth. He was lovely, Christ, almost a boy still, his narrow hips and his sprinter’s thighs. Not so—not so different, Strachey thought, from the boy who had lain for hours—Swithinbank’s hand at his nape—on Keynes’s narrow white Eton bed. Not so different from the boy who had kissed him and kissed him and—Swithinbank’s tongue in his mouth—and _kissed_ him and made of Keynes’s bed the—Strachey nudged, nudged his hips into the boy’s thigh—the honeyed moon, and stars, and the whole glittering world. 

And then? Strachey thought, as Swithinbank sucked, lazy, at his bottom lip in the speckled light and Strachey’s head began to swim. (Had Keynes’s head begun to swim?) And then? When had the two of them discussed _notation_ systems, and qualitative ratings? Was Swithinbank sucking like that on the— _oh_ on the tip of Keynes’s pleading tongue? _Jerusalem the Golden_ , Keynes had said, but he hadn’t mentioned anything about . . . anything about— _Christ_ , he thought, Swithinbank’s hands, sliding under his shirt; his _fingers_ , dancing up Strachey’s belly; slotting between his ribs, kneading into his skin like he must have done—like he might have—like he could have—and how had he—how had Keynes, after, noted it down? Strachey ground his hips down, _down_ into Swithinbank’s. The boy groaned, and arched up, and Strachey drew back, breathing hard. 

‘This journal,’ he said, panting. 

‘ _Pardon?_ ’ said the boy.

‘You know,’ Strachey said, taking his hand out of Swithinbank’s hair to gesture impatiently. ‘The journal, Keynes’s _other_ journal.’

Aghast at himself, he shut his eyes for patience. He opened them again to the sight of Swithinbank, affronted, looking as if Keynes had grown a second and highly baffling head. 

‘All right,’ Swithinbank said, ‘yes, Keynes’s second journal, I do follow.’

‘It’s just,’ Strachey said, ‘We’ve known each other two years, now, M—Keynes and I. At Cambridge, of all places, you know, not even Oxford. We’ve been—well. _Running in the same circles_ , if you follow me, and what’s more, discussing it. Why wouldn’t he have shown the bloody thing to _me_?’

‘I really couldn’t say,’ Swithinbank said, starting to laugh. ‘He and I haven’t spoken for years.’ 

He was propped up on his elbows in the grass in the shade. Staining his sleeves, probably. Mussing his exquisite shirt tails. His hair was tousled and he had a dimple in the right cheek but not the left, and Strachey wanted to drink him like champagne. It was highly frustrating to be instigating this horrible conversation. 

‘Oh come now,’ he said, rolling on top of Swithinbank, nuzzling at his shirt buttons and the warmth of his stomach and and down to his dappled trouser flies. The boy groaned; hardened against Strachey’s cheek. Strachey opened his mouth wide over bulging tweed, and breathed out, hot. Swithinbank’s hand was petting, petting in his hair. 

‘Come on,’ Strachey said again, breathing, nuzzling. Swithinbank’s hips twitched up. ‘You must have some idea.’ 

‘God, I—,’ Swithinbank said, and stopped. And swallowed. And pressed on Strachey’s head, speechless. 

Strachey teased open buttons with his hands and his teeth until he was nuzzling the boy’s cock through just his striped cotton smallclothes; then he looked up at him, politeness all over his face, awaiting an answer. 

‘He never,’ Swithinbank got out, ‘he never liked to tell boys about it beforehand, thought it might— _Christ_ ,’ he said, drawing it out as Strachey made his mouth wet and open and took into it a mouthful of striped cloth and warm, salty flesh. He gathered saliva in the front of his mouth, and soaked skin through cotton with Swithinbank panting above him; he sucked the warm cloth off the boy’s erection and moved his tongue to make the fabric tease and fret at his cockhead. Swithinbank tried—actually tried to thrust into Strachey’s mouth, despite being fettered, still, by his drawers, helpless; his narrow hips shifting under Strachey’s hands. Strachey heard himself groan at that; felt his eyes roll up. He almost lost the thread of—of—. He was aching-hard and rutting Swithinbank’s calf, sucking him through his smalls though he wanted to _glut_ himself and Swithinbank obviously wanted to—wanted to come with his cock halfway down Strachey’s throat; and Strachey almost missed Swithinbank gritting out, ‘—thought it might—uh— _uh—_ bias the results, I— _oh_ ,’ which sentence reminded Strachey that he’d had some kind of mad misguided objective. 

He pulled back; stilled his own hips with an effort. Nosed into the slit in Swithinbank’s drawers, and coaxed his cock out with his tongue. Lapped it base to tip. Took a calming, steadying breath.

‘And what does “biasing the results” have to do with me?’ he asked, innocent. Suckling quick and teasing, bitter salt on his tongue, _delicious_ , Lord, _concentrate_ , and Swithinbank above him struggling to speak. 

‘Maybe he— _yes_ , God, Lytton, _please_ —,’ but Strachey pulled back and looked up again, expectant. Swithinbank groaned. His cock bobbed slick and leaking, inches from Strachey’s lips; Strachey was shocked at himself, not to be currently choking on it. 

‘Maybe,’ Swithinbank managed at last, ‘he fancies adding you to the count.’ 

‘I don’t think that’s very _likely!_ ’ Strachey spat, at once, slapping the ground in frustration. ‘Do _you_?’ He glared up the length of Swithinbank’s body to where the boy’s arm was crooked over his eyes like he was in agony.

‘Oh God I don’t know why not,’ Swithinbank said, rolling his head from side to side on the grass. ‘I can’t think of a bloody thing right now but your m—but you; I don’t know why Maynard deuced Keynes would be any—God God God yes _Lytton_ oh _Christ_.’ For Strachey had leaned forward at last and stretched his lips around him, and thrust his mouth down until it was full, and then a little further.

Swithinbank sounded like he might _cry_. He was pushing now, light on Strachey’s head as Strachey drew back, slow, slow, slow, with his tongue pressed up hard and forward, and then slid back down all at once. Strachey’s arms were under Swithinbank, urging him deeper, cupping his narrow sprinter’s buttocks in his palms and Strachey wanted—Strachey wanted to—to strip the boy out of his—Swithinbank gasping and cursing and leaking in his mouth—strip the boy out of his—his sailor suit, his—his _tweeds_ , Christ, concentrate, Swithinbank thrusting up, and up, he wanted to—to bend the boy’s narrow hips over the narrow white bed, the—the rust-coloured—the narrow white Eton bed and sink into him up to the—

‘Oh _. . . bloody . . ._ hell,’ Swithinbank groaned above him, sounding older than Strachey remembered, so that Strachey was half a second late remembering to swallow.  

Swithinbank’s cock was still pulsing weakly in his mouth, and Swithinbank still gasping as if he’d run a race, when Strachey remembered that he’d been wrong. That had been Keynes’s story about _Macmillan_. Not about Swithinbank, at all. 

‘Christ, c’mere,’ Swithinbank was saying, struggling up onto his elbows, ‘let me, let me, where did you _learn_ —’ but Strachey was frowning, petulant, sitting back on his heels. 

‘Keynes told _me_ ,’ he said, ‘that there was nothing between the two of you but the life of the mind and some rather protracted kissing.’ 

Swithinbank, boneless and goofy still, made a noise that was half-groan, half-laugh, and collapsed backwards onto the grass with his hands over his eyes. Strachey could feel the pout coalescing on his own features. Swithinbank laughed, silent, for a long time, scrubbing at his face.

‘Well,’ he said at last. ‘There was certainly never anything like _that_ ,’ doing up his trousers over his ruined drawers, ‘and if you’d get up here I’d be more than happy to—'

‘It’s just, how _exactly_ ,’ Strachey heard himself saying, ‘do the subjects of medieval French poetry and chaste schoolboy kisses, devolve into a statistical breakdown of possible sex acts?’

‘I really don’t—’

‘I’m quite serious,’ Strachey went on, with mounting horror at his own stubbornness. ‘Whose _idea_ was it? His, presumably, but how did he bring the thing up? I say, Winthrop old boy—’

‘He told you my middle name?’ said Swithinbank, amused, but Strachey ignored him.

‘—when the cloistered Benedictine brothers had a few moments to themselves, what do you suppose they got up to in their private—'

‘I’ll _show_ you what they got up to,’ Swithinbank interrupted, pulling Strachey in by the shirt-front and stopping his mouth with his tongue. Strachey sputtered; pushed at the boy’s shoulders; but Swithinbank rumbled at the taste of himself in Strachey’s mouth, and climbed over Strachey’s legs to sit in his lap and press his palm into Strachey’s flies, and it was really quite—he was getting hard again, he was—Swithinbank’s arm around his shoulders, holding him still, holding him quiet while Strachey kissed him and pushed his cock into Swithinbank’s palm in little—shivery—pushes until Swithinbank drew back to unbutton his flies, and then—

‘Bernard?’ came a voice, through the trees. ‘Lytton?’ 

They swore together, and jumped apart: Swithinbank tucking in his shirt, Strachey doing up his trousers. 

‘It’s only Beazley,’ Swithinbank said, probably a little louder than he intended, because Beazley, already coming around the corner of the shelter, took one look at them, and burst out laughing.

‘And a good thing, too,’ Beazley said. ‘Good Lord, _look_ at you both.’

‘We’ll—tell anyone who asks, that we went riding and fell off our horses,’ said Swithinbank.

‘What, both of us?’ Strachey asked, distracted, pulling grass out of his hair. Beazley laughed again.

‘You won’t need to tell anyone anything,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Bertrand’s the golden boy at Balliol, and you’re his guests. We’ll just—just take you up the back way, and get you changed. Lytton, Alys wants to consult on, _I_ don’t know. Something to do with the library.’

So they trailed back through the Park in the golden afternoon, Strachey still feeling put out not to have got any better answers regarding the journal. He only realised later, to his horror, while changing for dinner in his room, that what he _ought_ to be feeling put out about was a missed chance at copulation with a Dionysian youth.

 

 

 

Alys’s library consulting, as it turned out, occupied most of the afternoon. Then a debate over the Dreyfus Affair monopolised the supper table and cigars (and, Strachey suspected, the ladies’ conversation as well, since Flo and Nora were discussing the newspaper treatment when the men rejoined them after an interminable hour and a half); and Strachey, eyelids heavy from all the fresh air and speculation, left Macmillan and Swithinbank still arguing by the hearth rug and made his way to bed. It was doubly tiresome, he thought, loosening his tie on the stairs: since, as might be expected, everyone at table had been of essentially the same opinion. 

The night was cool. Not yet full summer, even at the very end of June. He spread the cream wool blanket over the coverlet, but his sheets were chill when he slipped between them. From down the hall came the footfalls and goodnights of the guests as they straggled up to bed. Strachey pulled the blankets up to his chin; shivered his sheets warm. 

The rust-coloured coverlet was itchy now against his chin. Insisting, he thought, on its own existence: since on the grass with Swithinbank he’d seemed to have such awful trouble keeping it in mind. He pulled it up, over his nose and mouth and his eyebrows so that his warm breath was trapped with him under the covers. He shivered and thought of Swithinbank. Swithinbank, close-shaved in a sailor suit, with gigantic eyes. 

He could’ve had such a thing, Strachey thought. A little white-and-blue sailor suit. A little blue-and-white cap. A ribbon to dangle in his wide brown youthful eyes. 

Keynes had said it about Macmillan; had said he’d _stripped him out of his sailor suit and bent him over my_ —Keynes’s hand on Strachey’s hip—Strachey’s breath dampening the sheets. But that didn’t mean Swithinbank, too, mightn’t have been dolled up in boyish estate for a trip or two to the Eton Boat Houses. Keynes had known Macmillan first; he’d met Swithinbank only later. Perhaps, all the while Keynes had been buggering little Macmillan in silence, thrusting hard into him bent over his narrow white bed, perhaps—who knew? Perhaps Swithinbank and Macmillan had known each other, already. 

Strachey breathed in the warm, close air. The sheets were less frigid, now. His shoulders relaxed over his head. His cock was filling, slowly; half-hard between his legs. The cotton was at once smooth and rough.

Perhaps, he thought, they’d actually gone boating together. Macmillan and Swithinbank, two fourth-year boys in their blue and their white, pulling for Eton past Windsor Castle in May. Perhaps Swithinbank had sat behind Macmillan in the scull. Perhaps he’d watched him, pulling the oars with his stocky arms, yes, stocky even then, muscled under the fat, and freckled in the sun. Perhaps Swithinbank had watched Macmillan’s hips slide forward, pushing against the weight of the water on the downstroke. Perhaps he had watched him—Strachey touched himself, gentle, teasing, took his hand away—fidgeting in his white trousers on the hard wooden bench, and Swithinbank wouldn’t have known why, wouldn’t have—Strachey pushed his hips up; he was _hard_ , oh, the sheets pulled tight—wouldn’t have known his teammate was sore and used and aching because he’d been—been buggered in silence by—Strachey arched up and sucked in a lungful of damp air; he wanted to touch, he wanted to _touch_ , but he thought of a narrow Eton bed and felt suddenly—

—observed. 

Absurd, though. He was covered up: blankets and sheets and rust-coloured coverlet. Alone in a room at the top of Alys and Bertand’s new house. Nonetheless. It was almost as if cold eyes were upon him. 

Dark eyes, he thought. Sparkling with a kind of detached amusement, a kind of interest. Watching as Strachey reduced himself to writhing around in linens, thinking of sailor suits. He curled up a bit, on his side. 

He’d thought of—tried to think of Keynes, before; Keynes thrusting inside young Macmillan. And they were Keynes’s eyes, of course, peering through blankets and coverlet. His best feature, thought Strachey, wryly; his deep black brilliant eyes. They weren’t cold, though; not really. Not always. Not that night at Trinity, he remembered. That evening in Strachey’s rooms they had burnt all up his front; and he had flushed hot; drenched them both in brandy. But it was as if something—something stood, now, between Strachey and that heat. He breathed deep, uncoiling his spine. The inside of his skull felt tender.

Down the hall, the grandfather clock struck one. He could almost hear the scratching of a pen on paper. 

And what if he _were_ here, then? Strachey thought, with a sudden surge of annoyance. What if Keynes _were_ here, hmm’ing and pursing his lips, and writing it all down in his little book? Keynes had no prerogative to call Strachey names. Not when he’d made of deflowering young Macmillan some numerical cypher; and of kissing Swithinbank an algebraic equation; and of his own _pleasure—_ Strachey gave a little groan. What had Keynes made, of his own pleasure? 

Numbers on a page, Strachey supposed. Numbers on a page, distilled from his stifled moans and his tenderness. And if he were here—looking snidely, perhaps, at Strachey trailing damp fingertips between his legs to cup his bollocks in his palm—what of Strachey would be run to ground? Was the calculus unchanging? Or would Strachey’s numbers be—as his cock hardened again in his gentle shaking hand—in some ineffable way, unique?

 _Perhaps they went boating_ , Keynes might say, in that tone of lofty amusement he used to his students when they fell short of the mark. _Hardly revolutionary, is it, Lytton? A four, perhaps, for interest. Though the detail of the oar in the water-weight is rather nice_.

 _No_ , Strachey thought. He made a huffing noise into the covers. _Not ‘rather nice._ ’ A six, it would have to be; or a seven-point-nine. He shut his eyes. Macmillan’s shifting buttocks on the sculling bench faded from view; there was in his mind’s eye only Keynes, with his pen and and his pinstripes and his black moleskin. His eyes, as Strachey stroked himself in the silent bed, were stubbornly cast down.  

Strachey kicked his heel against the mattress. Under the stretched-tight sheets he was pinned. Alone.

‘Maynard,’ Strachey said, aloud in the empty room. No one, of course, answered. Down the hall, the grandfather clock struck the quarter-hour. 

He breathed in, and out. And in.

Perhaps, he thought, it had been more than that, between Macmillan and Swithinbank. For all Strachey knew, Swithinbank had been apprised of all Keynes’s dabblings with Macmillan. Perhaps at Eton all the boys knew.  

Or perhaps, again, Macmillan had kept it from Swithinbank. Southern tempers, thought Strachey, thumb teasing now at his cockhead— _yes_ —Southern tempers were so incendiary. Perhaps Swithinbank, sitting behind Macmillan in the scull, only suspected. Intrigued by a rumour, perhaps. Tormented by a whisper behind him at Chapel which he might have only imagined; overheard as the headmaster had discoursed, from the pulpit, on ‘filth.’ 

 _Filth_ , Keynes had said once, at the Apostles. _I ask you. The man preached badly enough for an archdeacon, and never defined his terms._ Keynes had rolled his eyes, Strachey remembered; and Hobby had thrown back his golden head and laughed.

‘Filth,’ Strachey muttered, aloud, to the carpet and the wallpaper and the rust-coloured coverlet. Tugging harder on his erection under the sheets.

And what if they’d—what if they’d been on duty, to clean the boats? To re-rack them after the other students had gone? At _Eton_? Keynes would say, tutting, scribbling in his notebook as Strachey thrust, angry, through the tight ring of his own forefinger and thumb. But Strachey liked the image of Swithinbank, glowering over the gunwales of the little sculls, the doors open at both ends of the boat house. He liked—liked the idea of Swithinbank ordering Macmillan about a bit; liked the idea of Swithinbank, short of breath (Strachey was panting, now); of Swithinbank watching Macmillan squirm about on the ground, goose-flesh under rolled-up shirtsleeves. 

They’d—they’d have to be quick, Strachey thought, speeding up his hand a little. One of their tutors could come by at any moment; Swithinbank would have to seize his chance. But he’d be watching; and when Macmillan turned his back, when he reached to hang the oars high-up on their rack on the wall— _Marked down for cliché_ ,Keynes might say; but from this angle Macmillan’s blond head tipped back and Strachey moaned—Swithinbank would come up behind him. Taller; thinner. Pin his wrists to the wall, whisper in his ear. 

‘I was watching you,’ he’d say, or something like it. ‘Did you think I wouldn’t see? Who is he, Dan? Is he a tutor? Does he get you alone in College Library? In a private room, does he—'

 _Antiquities room,_ Keynes had said once, reminiscing at supper, _I spent hours_ , and now Strachey’s hand clutched, involuntary, at his wet prick, and he thrust, and—

Swithinbank, pushing Macmillan’s wrists into the wall with one hand while he groped his arse with the other, almost slapping it, almost—‘Does he get you alone,’ Swithinbank would say, ‘in the Antiquities room? Does he bugger you up against the wall next to the—'

 _If you really wanted filth, of course,_ Keynes had said, that night at supper, with Hobby’s mouth claret-stained and giggling into his glass, _they had a Gutenberg Bible_ —  

‘—to the Gutenberg Bible? Does hemake you recite for him? Chapter and verse and the Book of Common Prayer as he fills you up, does he bend you over and— _’_

Strachey _groaned._ He fucked his fist harder and imagined Keynes, at seventeen—but no, _no_ —. 

He threw the covers off his hot face, and breathed up at the ceiling, aching-hard and scowling with his hand stilled on his cock.  

He imagined—imagined _himself_ , then. Himself as he was now, as he’d never been. Lytton Strachey at twenty-six, Eton tutor, out for a stroll. Hearing a rustling in the boat house. Padding over the soft Spring grass; silent underfoot; stumbling through the open boat house door and happening upon—

—upon Hobby, drunk and giggling with his arse bared, and Keynes— _Oh_ , _nine_ , Keynes might say, his eyebrows raised—

— _no_ , upon—

—upon Swithinbank, grinning, pinning Macmillan’s wrists above his head as he thrust against Macmillan’s arse through both their clothes, desperate— _Four_ —

—no, upon—

—upon Strachey on his knees, back to the boat house wall with Swithinbank’s cock down his throat and his own cock out of his trousers and Macmillan on his stomach in his sailor suit on the dirt floor, playing with him, pulling on him lightly, too lightly— _Seven though one can’t happen upon oneself in a boat house, Lytton—_

—no, _no_ , upon—upon—

—upon Keynes, it was Keynes, Strachey thought, gripping himself again, panting—Keynes on his knees, with his mouth full. Keynes’s back against the boat house wall with Macmillan’s hand cushioning his head like Strachey’s had in the alley at King’s, and Macmillan’s cock sliding wet through Keynes's stretched-wide lips. 

And Macmillan’s fleshy freckled thighs, Strachey thought, turning on his stomach to rut the mattress, good, yes, Christ, good. Macmillan’s white breeches around his ankles, his quaking belly under Keynes's fingers and his hands on Keynes’s head and a desperate, overwhelmed look all over his fair face as Swithinbank curled over his body and buggered him hard. And Macmillan’s shaking arms, trying to brace himself against the wall, almost crying with the effort of stopping Swithinbank choking Keynes.  

Strachey got up on his knees. Spread his legs, gasping into the pillows. The air was cool on the sweat all down his back and his thighs and the backs of his bollocks. Swithinbank laughed in Macmillan’s ear; fucked into him hard and sudden. Macmillan moaned, head lolling back onto Swithinbank’s shoulder. Strachey had his knees so wide he could fuck into the bed if he thrust—thrust—and Swithinbank _thrust_ , and Macmillan whinedand Keynes—Keynes _choked_ and Macmillan startled back to himself to look down in horror. Went to pull back but he was pinned, and Swithinbank was laughing and Strachey was _close_ , he was so bloody close, and Keynes reached up to grip Macmillan’s arse and drag him _closer_. Strachey felt his eyes roll up in his head and Keynes said—

_An eight, at least, Lytton, in enthusiasm if not in accuracy._

_No_ , Strachey thought, thrusting frantically into the sheets, _no, you can’t_ — 

He was—Macmillan was—Swithinbank was teasing Macmillan, making him reach back and grope for Swithinbank’s hips, making him say _Bernard_ and _please_ and _Christ give it me, Christ_. Strachey panted; rutted; moaned. But Keynes at seventeen blurred at the edges, choking and blinking, as Macmillan stared down at him, and Swithinbank laughed. 

Strachey swore; screwed his eyes shut in the empty room. 

Keynes at twenty-two, in his City pinstripes or Strachey’s dressing gown, might say: _But looked at from a perspective of political economy, I suppose this is merely you, finding your natural equilibrium._

‘Christ,’ Strachey panted. Incensed. Exhausted. Going soft in his hand.

He kicked off the covers completely, then. The rust-coloured coverlet slipped off the bed. He kicked his heel against the mattress. He cursed, and swung his feet onto the floor with wide-open eyes. 

 

 

 

Two in the morning and Strachey still seethed. He was wound tight, wandering the back paths past Tower House. It was all so preposterous. This was to be a simple holiday. A sojourn into old-fashioned collegiate respectability, into Alys’s cook’s vol-au-vent and long fussy supper conversations; an escape from everything to do with Hobby’s bright curls and Keynes’s wide toad’s smile. With luck there might have been a promising young Oxford freshman.  

Oh, he thought, to be mildly and divertingly in love with a slender boy of sixteen! Some boatswain with a Grecian profile and not a word of English! Oh to be pining gently on a balcony in the south of France, and not (stubbing his toe on the gravel outside the Chapel) to be traversing Oxford in an insomniac rage by the light of the moon.

Could it really be _this bloody difficult_ , he thought, going two days together without turning a corner and coming upon a reminder of one blasted man? Was it really _reasonable_ that one’s casual friend—hardly more than an acquaintance—a man of whom one never set out to think, and who resembled, on top of it all, an amphibian—to think that such a man would prove himself so ubiquitous? Could it _possibly—_? But yes, apparently it could: as there, unmistakably, was the stolid form of Dan Macmillan, looking out at Strachey from the Chapel portal. 

Strachey was so very, very tired. 

Nonetheless. He’d been spotted. 

‘Ahoy, Strachey,’ said Macmillan, in his cheery baritone. Strachey felt like scratching off his own skin. 

‘Evening, Macmillan,’ he said, instead. ‘Sweet is the night air, and all that.’ 

Macmillan was leaning back against a flying buttress, pale in the moonlight. He looked, thought Strachey, like an annoyingly corporeal ghost. Strachey shook his hand, gritting his teeth.

‘Something in the supper didn’t agree with me, I’m afraid,’ Macmillan said, sounding awfully cheerful about it. ‘Thought a bit of a constitutional would be just the thing. And I thought if anything could calm my nerves it would be revisiting the scene of that service this morning. Really cracking stuff. The best of the real High Church style, wasn’t it? None of this Continental emotionalism, just good, solid—’

Strachey nodded; closed his eyes. Loosed his mind on its tether. Macmillan was prattling on: something about the conversation at supper; how to be honest Bernard’s points had rather passed him by, but how he was pleased, at any rate, to be English, as the Royal Army was operating under no such cloud as the Third Republic had drawn down upon itself. Strachey thought that if he had set out to conjure an embodiment of the John Bull clerk—complete with his squalid little ménage in Streatham; his bad cook; his wife with her calling cards, his respectable copulations—he could not have done better than Dan Macmillan. _Macmillan_ ought to be in Ceylon, thought Strachey, irrelevantly, in place of Leonard; and Leonard ought to be here, now, talking Strachey through his Keynesian predicament. Leonard might be inconveniently impoverished, and inexplicably enamoured of women; and, true, he knew Keynes as well as the next man; but at least Strachey’s primary associations with him were ones of intelligence and friendship, and didn’t involve Leonard being sodomised in deathly silence in Keynes’s schoolboy bedroom. 

‘—really, the worst and most dangerous excesses of the Papist French,’ Macmillan was saying. ‘I mean to _say_. This is what comes of—of cloistering monks, and eating vegetables raw.’

 _Mon Dieu_ , thought Strachey.

‘ _You_ probably expect a carrot boiled for two hours together,’ he said.

‘I—,’ said Macmillan, but Strachey spoke over him, feeling reckless and wild in the lee of the Chapel. 

‘It must have bothered you, then,’ he said. ‘To know that Keynes was—was writing it all down.’

‘I—,’ said Macmillan, again. ‘Pardon?’

‘That he was _writing it all down_ ,’ Strachey said. ‘Everything you both got up to, in his rooms at Eton. Did he keep you appraised of your running tally? So that you could comport yourself, shall we say, with an eye toward advancement?’ 

Macmillan was backing toward the Chapel’s outer wall, eyes wide.

‘Ruthless efficiency,’ said Strachey, ‘in the face of a regimented challenge is, after all, the proper Englishman’s opportunity to shine.’

Macmillan’s pale face just gaped at him. It was delicious, really. The first proper satisfaction Strachey’d gleaned in months. He moved forward, grinning. His steps crunched on the gravel.

‘I mean to say,’ he went on. He was less than a foot from Macmillan, now. ‘If he did, it must have been a rather one-sided conversation. From what he told _me_ , you couldn’t even talk about it, during. Swithinbank can laugh it off all he wants, but _you_ _must_ not have liked it.’ 

‘What did he,’ stammered Macmillan. ‘What did he say I—.’ 

He was swallowing convulsively, staring into Strachey’s eyes. Strachey stepped forward again. Backed Macmillan right up against the flying buttress with his hands bracketing Macmillan’s head, his heart _beating_. 

‘Maynard told _me_ ,’ Strachey said, ‘that you let him _thoroughly_ debauch you,’ leaning in to nip at Macmillan’s ear, ‘in his rooms,’ lowering his voice, ‘in the tattered remnants of your sailor suit.’

Macmillan made a spluttering, indignant noise. He sounded like a City solicitor, found out for embezzlement. Strachey wanted to just _scandalise_ him. 

‘He told me you let him bend you over his bed,’ Strachey said, into Macmillan’s ear. He felt his own cock thickening in his trousers. ‘That you wouldn’t open your mouth, but you came with him when he called.' 

Macmillan’s breath came hot on Strachey’s neck and his jaw. The moon slipped for a moment behind a cloud; everything darkened, and Strachey had a brief, visceral memory of that night at Trinity, Keynes’s strangely panicked pleading about Hobby. 

‘He said you were shameless,’ Strachey said. ‘Said you squirmed all over his mattress. And up against the wall in the boat house you would—'

‘Up against the _wall_?’ Macmillan gasped. ‘In the _boat house_?’   

Strachey laughed out, right in Macmillan’s ear; Macmillan started. Strachey slapped the chapel wall with his palm. He wasn’t sure if he was laughing at Macmillan, or at his own mistake. He leaned in, chuckling, shaking his head. Their lips almost—almost—almost met. 

‘So the rest of it’s true, then?’ Strachey breathed. ‘All the rest of that _sordid_ little story? 

Macmillan made a pained noise. Strachey pressed his hips into Macmillan’s hips as Macmillan breathed fast against his chest. His mind was full of Keynes’s voice and Keynes’s odd dark eyes _._ Macmillan’s hands were hovering above Strachey’s waist, like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to pull him in closer or push him away. 

‘I didn’t know,’ Macmillan gasped. Strachey laughed again; licked at his ear. Macmillan nudged his hips into Strachey’s leg; then jerked them back and groaned. 

‘You didn’t know he was buggering you in his rooms?’ 

‘I didn’t know about the _journal_ ,’ said Macmillan, almost yelling. He pushed Strachey away from him hard enough that he stumbled. ‘I didn’t know about it until later, until—until Swithinbank told me about it, later on.’

Strachey had caught himself on a retaining wall bordering the Chapel walk; he’d banged his heel and put out his hand as he stumbled, and now stood half-hunched over, breathing hard, staring at Macmillan, who squinted studiously into the dark of the neighbouring trees. 

‘Ah,’ Strachey said. His hand was skinned. Hot anger boiled up in his chest. 

Macmillan didn’t look round. 

‘Pleasant surprise for you then, was it?’ Strachey said.  

Macmillan flinched. 

‘I mean to say,’ Strachey said, speaking fast, too fast, ‘to find that your stolen moments of pleasure, few and far between though they were, and undoubtedly plagued by guilt, had become the fodder for some kind of—of demented experiment, some—some _exercise_ in political economy. That must have been a—a rude shock, mustn’t it, finding that the person you’d counted a lover, who’d—who’d seemed so eager, no doubt, to get you alone in his rooms, had in actuality not a scrap of poetry in his soul; was reducing you to—to _numbers_ , and charting you against all his other conquests. You must have been rather uncomfortable, when you heard.’

‘Whereas _you_ ,’ Macmillan said, through gritted teeth, meeting Strachey’s eyes at last, ‘merely accost complete strangers on hallowed ground, and make assumptions regarding things you know absolutely nothing about.’

They stared daggers at each other, a full minute in the moonlight of St. John’s. Strachey’s mouth was open, but he didn’t speak. In the end Macmillan spat on the ground and stormed off, back toward Balliol. Strachey cursed. He watched him go. He kicked the retaining wall so hard that hours later, as he toted his trunks into the train station two days early, furious in the rosy light of dawn, he was limping, still, on his left side.

 

* * *

##  **July 1905**

**Lytton Strachey to Leonard Woolf  
** **69, Lancaster Gate, London**

**As for Keynes— […] I can’t help recognising that, in the obvious and proper sense, he is my friend. Yet sometimes, when he says something, the whole thing seems to vanish into air, and I see him across an infinite gulf of indifference. That there should be anyone in the world so utterly devoid of poetry is sufficiently distracting; and, when I reflect that somebody is Maynard, I can’t be surprised at my cracking jokes on him with the Corporal about empty biscuit-boxes, and yet. How well I know that he’ld do most things one could think of for me, and his eyes——!**

* * *

It was rage. Rage, building all through the morning he spent in the chilly station; all through the hours on the Varsity Line. He never could keep up a head of steam; he more than half-expected his upset over Keynes’s ludicrousness to fizzle before the Verney Junction. Instead he grit and ground his teeth through Bletchley and Millbrook, and by the time he shooed the porter, with his trunk, out the compartment door ahead of him, and set foot on Cambridge soil, his hands and his legs were positively shaking with anger.

Keynes, he thought, directing his trunks back to Trinity. Keynes. Bending his steps down Hills Road, toward King’s. Rage, boiling up under his skin like a rash. He shut his eyes on disconnected images: Holroyd, looking up at Keynes like a craven puppy as Strachey watched on; Hobby, with his hand down Keynes’s trousers on Strachey’s bed; Macmillan, bent in half over Keynes’s bed at Eton; Swithinbank kissing and kissing Keynes; and Keynes (Strachey growled, low in his throat, turning into the Crowne Plaza), _noting it all down_. 

It was a relief, being furious. Being furious as he ought to have been; as he’d told Leonard he had been—that day in March when he’d gone to confront—to see Keynes. Furious as he’d tried to be about Hobby. But he was furious now: down the length of Corn Exchange Street; turning into Parson’s Court.  Furious as he banged through the doors of King’s, still seething, pounding up the stairs; so lit up with anger that he didn’t cough, or call out, or knock twice as per their arrangement, but simply flung wide the door of Keynes’s room and stepped inside, not caring whom he might see.

Pausing only briefly, when there was nobody about.  

Buoyed along on tidal rage, he yanked shelves off brackets, drawers off runners. All Keynes’s neatly-ordered shelves, he thought with a sneer; all his horrible dusted chests with their fastidious compartments. They clattered and clanged on the hardwoods. Books off the shelves and shaken out, dropped to the floor with their pages bent and their spines broken. The wardrobe doors banged back with a crack; he flung jackets and trousers off their hooks. Socks—kerchiefs—braces went flying. He turned, panting; looked about him with a kind of savage satisfaction at the mess. Wanted it worse. To think of Keynes so tidy, so unaffected; doing up his flies on Strachey’s bloody bed. Strachey with a snarl tore the cushion from the seat of the velvet chair.

But of course, he thought, holding the cushion: there wasn’t a scrap of poetry in the man. And he strode over the books and braces to the bed. Tore down the sheets and the coverlet, and lifted up the mattress. The moleskin underneath it was mockingly pristine. Aligned precisely and obnoxiously with a pencil-stub, on one side, and a flat tin of petroleum jelly, on the other. Strachey snatched up the book; dashed the rest of it to the floor. His hands trembled. He thought of tearing the thing apart.

Instead he placed the velvet cushion into its seat with ostentatious calm—though there was no one, of course, to see him—and removed his jacket. Rolled up his shirt-sleeves, and sat himself down amongst the wreckage of Keynes’s rooms, remembering at the very moment he opened the journal that Swithinbank had said: _Encoded, of course_.

Strachey shut his eyes. _Shaking_ with fury. Breathed out, and in. Opened them, and looked down at the book, and— 

Of course. 

Rows of numbers where he’d have looked for words; neat little columns of letters where he wanted names, all just _sitting_ there, trembling in his furious hands. He wanted to bite. He wanted to _howl_. 

‘ _Bloody_ —political—,’ he said to himself, as from the door a surprised voice said ‘Lytton?’ and he spun up onto his feet. 

‘Lytton,’ Keynes said, again, frozen in the doorway, his tie askew. Circles under his eyes. ‘I didn’t expect you back from Balliol until Tuesday, and what—what _happened_ here? Was there a—’

‘I met some old friends of yours,’ said Strachey. His voice trembled. Hateful. Keynes was prodding a cushion with his toe; stepping over it; latching the door. Saying, unconcerned:

‘Oh yes? Who—’

‘Yes, Dan Macmillan,’ Strachey went on, a little too fast, holding up the journal, ‘and Bernard Swithinbank. They had some fascinating _mémoires_ to share, on the subject of your pastoral school days.’

‘I never claimed my school days were—,’ Keynes started, but Strachey spoke over him, voice rising:

‘You never exactly _volunteered_ the information that you were keeping a—a _ledger_ of your lovers’ vital statistics, though, did you, Maynard? Cross-referenced to date and type of encounter? I feel sure I would have remembered—’

‘But Lytton,’ Keynes said, starting to laugh, with the hand over his eyes inexplicably trembling, ‘why _would_ I have done? Surely you don’t—’

‘Oh yes, why would you have done, indeed. Indeed. It would certainly have called into question your anecdotes of wide-eyed fumblings on the sylvan green. You made it out—’

‘—I’m quite sure I never said anything about the sylvan—’

‘You made it out,’ repeated Strachey, moving closer, treading on Keynes’s books and baubles and cigarette cases, ‘to be all—all tender yearnings, and schoolboy discovery between you and—and Macmillan, say, and even more so between you and—’

‘It _was_ like that, I—’

‘—and _Swithinbank_ , good Lord, Maynard, you made that story out to be fit for—for tea with dowager aunts in the Cotswolds, and all along you were noting down figures about—about what? How many minutes you’d spent with your tongue down his throat, and the relative hardness of his erection as compared with other entrants?’

‘Look, Lytton,’ Keynes started, raising his voice at last, ‘just where do you get off—,’ but Strachey couldn’t stop now he had Keynes off-kilter. Now he’d backed him up almost to the dividing wall, both their feet tangled in shirts and neckties: white cotton and red silk. Strachey hoped viciously that they destroyed the lot.

‘Do you carry it about with you?’ he went on, crowding up with his chest to Keynes’s chest. ‘This—this book? Is that why it’s in this absurd cipher? Was it in the room with us when you told me all about the moon and stars and whatever tripe you concocted on the subject of Swithinbank? Was it—what? In your pocket? In your jacket pocket when you were shamming drunk on a glass of brandy and your—’ 

_—your hand on my hip your mouth on my belly your dark eyes your shoulders shaking your mouth your mouth—_

‘But it _was_ adolescent fumbling,’ Keynes was saying, as Strachey shook his head clear. ‘It was just as I told you, Lytton. Only Swithinbank and I happened to write some of it down, but I don’t know why you’re—’

‘—And in any case,’ Strachey went on, changing tack at speed as Keynes scowled, stepping backward over a pile of trousers, ‘this—this _thing_ was certainlyright here with us, just in the next room when I was telling you my feelings for Hobby and you— _oh_ ,’ Strachey said again, as Keynes choked on nothing and stopped walking. Strachey almost strode into him.

‘Christ, it’s such rubbish, _rubbish_ to be sodding an economist,’ Strachey said, furious. The moleskin was pressed between their stomachs. ‘Does _Hobby_ know about this little side-line of yours, Maynard? Did he think it was all jolly good fun? Did you deign to tell him about while he was—’

A _crack_. Sudden, and startling, and his mouth, his whole jaw stung burning with Keynes’s slap. He was—he was winded, panting. Keynes crowded him back, back across the room, with his hands hard on Strachey’s shoulders, eyes brilliant-dark.

‘Let’s pretend, Lytton,’ Keynes gasped, pushing him backward, and Strachey, snarling, stumbled. ‘Let’s pretend you’re right, about all this, that you’re,’ and he slapped him _again_ , hard across his mouth as Strachey tried to speak, ‘correct about everything, let’s just—let’s just say I have a—a love of figures in place of a heart, shall we, Lytton? Is that what—’

‘Not too bloody difficult to imagine,’ Strachey got out, twisting his arms up and over his head to force Keynes’s hands off his shoulders, as Keynes made a strangled noise and said ‘Christ, what a—what a respite it would be,’ and Strachey ducked, and turned, and knocked his kneecap hard into the bed-frame, not realising it was there.

‘God in—,’ Strachey said. He pitched sideways, awkward, onto the bed. He moved to clutch at his knee, but was knocked back; was flattened on his back on the mattress: Keynes’s weight had landed hard on his midriff. He wriggled; couldn’t move. Arms pinioned to sides; hips pinned with knees. He twisted, and cursed. 

‘There are, you know,’ said Keynes, trying for a conversational tone though he was panting, ‘compensations, Lytton, to being a—’

‘—A cold hearted _bastard_?’ gritted out Strachey, still squirming. Keynes laughed; dug a sharp knee into the side of his waist. 

‘If you like,’ he said. ‘Enamoured of—of numbers instead of people, isn’t that it? But you didn’t hear any complaints, did you, Lytton? From Dan, or Bernard? You didn’t hear them—’

’In _suff_ erable, self- _centred_ —,’ grunted Strachey, bucking his hips up under Keynes’s while Keynes held him down, and Keynes was— _Christ,_ Strachey thought. Sodding bloody bastard was—

‘—because there is something to be said,’ Keynes was saying, in something like his lecture voice, _infuriating_ , ‘for maintaining a certain degree of— _oh_ —of distance, Lytton: something of which _you_ seem tragically yet proudly incapable; but I must say I’ve never collected any data correlating a greater intensity of— _unh_ —of enjoyment in young men whose lovers, say, moon about under the stars in raptures of poetic agony—’

‘How convenient,’ Strachey growled, twisting his fettered torso, ‘as you do so enjoy a lie-in—’

‘—not like the correlation between greater enjoyment,’ Keynes went on, almost grinding his erection down between Strachey’s thighs now, though the angle was awkward and the air over-warm and both their trousers thick, ‘and a lover who— _unh_ —who pays some modicum of bloody _attention_ , Lytton, to what the young man in question might actually _want_ , at a given—’

‘Careful, Maynard,’ said Strachey digging his elbows in, twisting his shoulders, ‘an observer might think you’re approaching a moment of— _unh—_ of real emotion, you wouldn’t want—’ and then Keynes was on him and he couldn’t speak. He was half-growling, half-shouting. Smothering with Keynes’s tongue in his mouth and Keynes’s erection digging into his belly and Keynes’s hands pressing his shoulders to the sheets. Keynes’s teeth were sharp. Quick and biting and Strachey bit back, snarling. 

‘And _you_ ,’ Keynes said, pulling away at last, his cheek and his lip teeth-bruised. He stretched out over him so he could keep Strachey’s shoulder pinned with one hand, and reach down with the other. Strachey’s whole body felt tight with blood; heated and hard and stretched to breaking. He still couldn’t move his hands.

‘Christ, Lytton,’ said Keynes, ‘you think _you’re_ a challenge? All those letters you write to Leonard about—,’ and he was sitting on Strachey’s knees, now, fumbling with Strachey’s trouser flies, ‘—about if only you could be a duchess, if only you could ride in a carriage in petticoats,’ and he jerked him hard and fast with his cruel soft scholar’s fingers, ‘ _petticoats_ , for Christ’s _sake_ ,’ as Strachey struggled, and groaned.

‘Don’t tell me, Maynard,’ he gritted out, ‘I’ll be treated to a presentation next, with—charts, and—numerical breakdowns and _oh_ bloody _hell—_ ’ 

‘Yes?’ Keynes laughed. ‘Yes?’ He kept-kept touching him. Hard. Brutal. It still felt like fighting him even moving together, even thrusting into his hands instead of away. Strachey growled. Keynes dropped his head and bit at Strachey’s lips, never stopping with his hand; sucked the breath out of Strachey’s lungs and then pulled back and turned it into words. 

‘You’re so obvious you may as well beg for it, Lytton,’ he said. ‘To be—to be laced into—Parisian silks, so tight you can’t breathe, and—,’ Strachey’s voice broke, torn from his throat, ‘—bent over some—some aristocrat’s—,’ Keynes laughed, ‘—brocade chaise longue and—slapped until you’re red and then just—buggered _blind_ —’

‘Ung—God,’ Strachey choked. Ready to—to burst from his very _skin_. ‘Turn me—,’ he said, and:

‘Bloody _Christ_ ,’ Keynes spat. He scrambled back, with his dark eyes wild and luminous and so wide they were ringed with white. He tugged down Strachey’s trousers and his smalls in the same motion as he bodily lifted him and turned him on his stomach, bare arse in the air. Strachey’s hands in fists in the pillows, so tight he might rip the cool cotton to shreds.

‘I—,’ said Keynes, ‘it’s a nightmare in here, what did you do, you _bastard_ —,’ and Strachey gasped out ‘On the floor,’ and a moment later there was shuffling and shifting and then a smack! to Strachey’s left buttock as Keynes came back with the tin. 

Strachey snarled. He yanked with his fists at the cotton pillowcase. He rubbed his face into it, as Keynes shoved angry fingers into him and smacked his arse again, stinging-hard, on the right.

‘You spent,’ Keynes said, ‘all week-end seducing my old classmates, didn’t you, Lytton? Just like you seduced Holroyd out from under me, just like you—you,’ and oh—hard, _wide_ , thrust in sudden up to the greasy knuckle as Keynes panted and humped his clothed erection against Strachey’s smarting arse-cheek. Strachey ground back into his hand and thought about Keynes coming in his trousers, pulling on Strachey’s corset-strings. 

‘And then you—oh— _fuck_ , I have to—,’ Keynes was saying, groaning, and Strachey was groaning too as Keynes sat back, and then again, deeper, into the pillow, rutting against air as Keynes spanked him again, flat-handed, twice, three times. 

Then Keynes’s fingers were gone and there was fumbling and cursing behind him as he spread his knees wider—wider—rubbing off against the sheets like he had in Alys and Bertrand’s attic bed while Keynes’s voice in his head had said _An eight, at least, Lytton_ , rutting himself desperate with his mouth open and his knees spread. A palm smacked down on his backside again—and again—and again—and he fucked harder into the bed; his whole skin was already tingling-hot and tight on his bones when Keynes pressed inside, jerky and breathless, and grunted ‘ _fucking Christ_ ,’ as Strachey cried out and fucked down hard and came immediately, helpless, curling into himself on the bed.

He heard himself saying—saying something like ‘ _oh_ ’ as Keynes stilled, uncertain. Something, in a voice that sounded drugged and far-away, like—' _come on_ ,’ so that Keynes gave a wild half-laugh and thrust into him where he was sensitive and shivery.

‘Yes? Come on, then?’ Keynes said. 

‘You can do better than—than that,’ Strachey slurred. ‘I spent the week-end—seducing your— _ungh—_ '

‘Seducing my friends,’ Keynes agreed, grunting, speeding up his strokes. ‘Listening to them, all about my—' 

‘Harder,’ Strachey moaned, still shivering, wanting him to—

’And then you came back here and just—just _ruined_ my bloody rooms,’ Keynes jerked out, thrusting harder, but frustrated, uncoordinated, desperate, ‘Snooping in my things, I ought to—fuck, I’m— _damn it_.’ His hands were slipping on Strachey’s waist; his voice sounded—sounded _panicked_ , Strachey thought. Sounded wrong.

‘I ought to—,’ Keynes was panting, ‘I ought to, I—can’t, I—,’ so Strachey, with a twist in his gut and odd, unwelcome tears starting in his eyes, reached back with a hand that was painfully soft, and touched Keynes’s thigh with fumbling fingers. 

‘Oh.’ Keynes’s voice broke in his throat. Strachey didn’t move his hand. Keynes pressed his thigh into it, pressed his cock deeper into Strachey’s body.

‘Lytton Christ Christ _God_ ,’ Keynes whispered. Strachey didn’t move his hand. Keynes made a pleading, heart-rent little noise, plastered against Strachey’s back, and Strachey held his breath while Keynes’s came fast on his nape, and didn’t move his hand, and Keynes thrust—and thrust—and stilled, pulsing, whining a very little in his ear.

‘Bloody hell,’ murmured Strachey, breathing at last, disoriented. ‘Bloody . . . hell,’ while against his back Keynes, limp and wrung-out, panted into his ear ‘Hobby broke things off with me, this morning.’

‘Bloody—,’ said Strachey, ‘— _pardon_?’ 

‘Hobby,’ Keynes repeated. He pulled out and rolled off him to stare up at the ceiling, arm bent over his eyes. Strachey turned and propped himself on an elbow.

‘Broke things—,’ Strachey said. 

Keynes nodded. ‘Told me just now. Out on—on Midsummer Common. He’s attracted a young lady, apparently. From Girton.’ 

‘I—,’ said Strachey, horror-struck, mouth agape. ‘And you—you let me go on and on?’

The bottom half of Keynes’s face betrayed a grimace. Strachey turned away from it to the window, squinting into the sun as the last twenty minutes played themselves back like a slow, horrifying moving picture.

‘All that business about—about the sylvan green, when you’d actually _been_ out—’

‘Well,’ said Keynes into his own elbow. ‘In point of fact, I’m not sure how sylvan it turned out to be.’

‘Christ in heaven, Maynard,’ Strachey said, ‘and the bit about—’

‘Personally,’ said Keynes, ‘I quite liked the bit about whether Hobby agreed it was rubbish, sodding an economist.’

Strachey groaned; Keynes snorted. Strachey hid his face in his hands in the shaft of early afternoon sunlight, and Keynes’s snorts turned to chuckles, and suddenly Strachey, too, was laughing uncontrollably into his palms. 

'Lord,’ Keynes said, as Strachey laughed.

‘Oh God. _God_. Was there ever such a disaster.’

‘Well,’ said Keynes. ‘And what about, you know. The rest of your—,’ lapsing into chuckles himself, ‘week-end? The parts that didn’t involve—,’

‘The progressive seduction and abuse of all your former school chums?’ Strachey said, and Keynes laughed out. ‘It was quite a full schedule, Maynard; I was—,’ as Keynes bit him lightly on the shoulder, ‘—only there for two days.’

‘Surely,’ said Keynes, into Strachey’s skin, ‘Dan and Bernard weren’t the only people present. What of Alys, and Bertrand, and—,’

‘Oh, you—you want to hear about my advice to Alys, do you? On the organisation of her personal library? Or—’

‘Fair point,’ said Keynes, ‘not particularly,’ as Strachey said:

‘The incipient sapphic idyll of an English rose and an American harpy? Or—,’

‘Oh Christ, no,’ Keynes groaned, rubbing at his face. ‘That sounds entirely too many females for my liking. Was it _ghastly_ , then? Were you adrift in a sea of beads and velvet?’

‘Oh,’ said Strachey, ‘it could have been worse.’ He stretched over Keynes’s body to the side-table for Keynes’s cigarette case and lighter. He lit them two at once, still propped up over Keynes’s stomach, and wiggled one in between Keynes’s lips. Keynes, inhaling, made a deep and grateful noise.

‘Beazley was there,’ said Strachey. He leaned back on his pillows again. Breathed deep of tobacco smoke. ‘Jolly and bullish as always. And Bertrand, of course. Oh, and a painter fellow. Cousin of mine, actually, though I haven't seen him in years.’

‘Young?’ 

‘Mmm,’ Strachey agreed. ‘Quite good-looking, though he was off to the fields more often than not. Grant, I believe. Duncan Grant.’

‘You should introduce me,’ Keynes said. ‘Now Hobby’s thrown me over, and you’ve ruined all my old flames for other men.’ 

Strachey groaned. ‘More like frightened them off any whiff of Cambridge,’ he said. ‘Lord, Maynard, I acted abominably.’

‘No doubt,’ said Keynes. His left hand traced absently the veins on the back of Strachey’s right wrist. ‘No doubt you did.’

They lay in silence for a minute, then two. In the early afternoon light the smoke curled up in tendrils. King’s, off-season and at one in the afternoon, was uncommonly quiet. Strachey supposed everyone was at dinner. What a strange thought.

‘Only one in the afternoon,’ said Keynes, stubbing out his cigarette at last, and rousing himself to a sitting position. ‘I must say, I’ve been quite efficient today. Two letters written this morning, breakfasted with Moore, jilted by my lover, had a row with and fucked my—.’ He tugged at his own hair, not meeting Strachey’s eyes.

‘Friend,’ said Strachey. 

Around his wrist Keynes’s fingers tightened, then released. 

‘Yes,’ Strachey went on, yawning and stretching. ‘Good show, Maynard. Excellent reading material in all your various journals, today.’

Keynes chuckled. 

‘Heaven protect us,’ he said, ‘from what the _evening_ might hold.’

 

 

 

###  **Notes**

  1. First things first: the letter fragments are all real, from actual letters written by Lytton Strachey. You can see that a) most of the events here more or less happened as written, and b) the Keynes/Strachey sexual tension and rivalry pretty much writes itself. Bless the Bloomsburies for being such gossips. I would never dare to put such a crazy coincidence as “Character gets told about previous sexual partners of a love interest and then COINCIDENTALLY ends up at the same house party as _both_ men,” but as you can see, it really did happen just that way. It’s less of a coincidence when you consider how inbred the upper-class social circles were in 1905 England, but it’s still pretty wacky.
  2. The summary text is from a letter by Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, written on 18 February 1927.
  3. The chronology of the letter-snippets parallels exactly, for the most part, the chronology of the events in the story. The one exception is the final snippet, which was actually written in December 1905, about six months after the story’s final scene. I like it too much as a précis of Strachey’s attitude vis-à-vis Keynes, to resist using it as a final chapter heading. To make the flow smoother for the reader, I took the precise dates off the letters, but they are, in order, for all you librarians and research-hounds out there: **2 December 1904, 15 February 1905, 28 February 1905, 8 March 1905, 13 June 1905, 5 December 1905**.
  4. The Cambridge Apostles were (and are) a semi-secret intellectual ‘conversation society.’ They were founded in 1820, but became famous around the time of the Bloomsbury Group’s rise to prominence, because so many of its members had belonged. Arthur Hobhouse wasn’t the first mutual crush of Strachey’s and Keynes’s whose membership they tried to finagle, but he was the first one elected. Strachey’s editor Paul Levy describes Hobhouse as ‘a Trinity undergraduate whose curly yellow hair seemed to some of his contemporaries the brightest thing about him.”
  5. Jeremy Bentham was a nineteenth-century philosopher, who founded the doctrine of utilitarianism. He also looked like Benjamin Franklin.
  6. Descriptions of Keynes’s Etonian sexual hijinx with Swithinbank and Macmillan are taken with only the lightest embroidery from Lytton Strachey’s letter to Leonard Woolf of 28 February 1905, as partially quoted here. That letter is marginally less dirty than my version. _Marginally._
  7. The Duke of Albany (and Saxe-Coburg and Gotha) was, at the time, the 21-year-old Leopold Charles Edward George Albert, grandson of Victoria and Albert and [relatively dashing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carl_Eduard_Sachsen_Coburg_und_Gotha.jpg). He had yet to be deprived of his British peerages or to join the Nazi party, both of which happened later in his life.
  8. The Bernard de Cluny poem ‘[Jerusalem the Golden](http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/jerusalem-the-golden-2)’ is what Swithinbank quotes in Part 4. Cluny was a favourite of Keynes’s during his later years at Eton.
  9. It’s very difficult to tell, from Strachey’s letters, exactly where at Balliol this infamous week-end house-party of June 1905 took place. However, a short while later Strachey was back in Oxford, and wrote Woolf that he had lunched in the home of Bertrand and Alys Russell, who were casual friends of the Stracheys. (Yes, the famous philosopher Bertrand Russell.) It’s perfectly _possible_ that the house-party could have been at their place as well, so lacking any confirmation, and needing a name for my host and hostess, I stuck it there.
  10. Thanks to [Songster’s Miscellany](http://songstersmiscellany.tumblr.com) for helping me out with some popular period duets: ‘Tell Me, Pretty Maiden’ was from the hit musical _Florodora_.
  11. The Dreyfus Affair was a French political scandal that spanned over a decade, and hinged on the conviction of a French Jewish soldier on false charges, by the French army. It became a cause célèbre in France, with the more progressive Dreyfusards squaring off against the more conservative anti-Dreyfusards, and famous folks like Émile Zola writing impassioned pleas ( _J’accuse_ ). By 1905 it had become fairly clear that Dreyfus was guilty of no wrong-doing; and in left-leaning, academic circles like those at the Russells’, sentiments were likely to have been uniformly Dreyfusard by this time. Which is not to say, given my experience of left-leaning academic dinner conversation, that universal agreement would necessarily preclude debate.
  12. Pretty much everything about Keynes at Eton referenced in the after-dinner-smoking conversation is true, and taken from Chapter 4 of Robert Skidelsky’s _John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed (1883-1920)_. Keynes did give a presentation on perfecting the rules of the Eton-specific sport ‘Wall Game’ the same third (term) that he sat and won the prestigious Tomline exam; he did compile a report called _Some Investigations About the Comparative Lengths of some Long Poems_ , which was much as described; he was banned from competing for maths prizes after his third year; his maths tutor was named Hurst. The encoded sex journal is also, believe it or not, [historical](http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/the-sex-diaries-of-john-maynard-keynes), as is the primary, non-encoded journal for everything but sex, whose contents were also much as described here. The only liberty I’ve taken is that I don’t know when Keynes started keeping his secondary, coded journal, though it sounds like it was in full swing by some point during his Cambridge years, as it includes fuck-tallies for Hobby, Lytton, and Duncan Grant. I think it’s not at all a stretch to imagine that he might have started it at Eton while experimenting sexually with Dilly Knox (his first liaison, before Macmillan, and quite a piece of work in his own right), or that he started it in the aftermath of his breakup with Knox, while he was involved with Macmillan.
  13. Historical: this same week-end party marked one of Strachey’s first adult meetings with his cousin, the painter Duncan Grant (cast here as Flo and Nora’s painting buddy), who would go on to become one of the serious loves of both Strachey’s and Keynes’s lives. However, also historical: Strachey’s letters indicate that he was, at first, more interested in Swithinbank, with whom he corresponded briefly prior to beginning a correspondence with Grant. Also historical: his interest in Swithinbank lasted about as long as Keynes’s affair with Hobby. You can’t make this shit up, my friends.
  14. As a side note, Dan Macmillan is the same 'Macmillan' of Macmillan Publishers. He went on to publish all Keynes's major works, although not Strachey's.
  15. The Reverend Edmond Warre, headmaster at Eton while Keynes, Macmillan, and Swithinbank were all students there, did indeed enjoy discoursing from the pulpit on the dangers of ‘filth,’ without ever defining what he meant by that term. He is described by Skidelsky as ‘immensely muscular and immensely Christian. Keynes’s remembered quip about preaching badly enough to be an archdeacon, is lightly adapted from a letter home, written on 12 November 1899.
  16. The non-standard abbreviation 'he'ld' rather than 'he'd' is as written by Lytton Strachey. He was quirky like that.
  17. In a twist that’s hardly surprising at this late date, Strachey actually did write letters to Leonard Woolf about being a widow, and wearing silk petticoats. See, for example, January 4 1906: ‘One feels, whenever one sinks into the cushions of the vast armchairs, that one ought to be dressed in silk skirts, and be a widow. Isn’t it scandalous that if one wants to be one, one shouldn’t be able? I pray God to make me a rich widow!—With all his omnipotence what can God do?’



 


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